John Fowles - The Magus

Turning every so often, I climbed up the path. Twice she waved from the jetty. I came over the steep rise and started through the last of the thirmed trees towards the house. I could see Maria standing by the music-room door, at the bell. But I hadn’t taken two steps across the gravel before the world split in half. Or so it seemed.

A figure had appeared on the terrace, not fifty feet away, facing and above me. It was Lily. It couldn’t be her, but it was her. The same hair blew about in the wind; the dress, the sunshade, the figure, the face, everything was the same. She was staring out to sea, over my head, totally ignoring me.

It was a wild, dislocating, disactualizing, shock. Yet I knew within the first few seconds that although I was obviously meant to believe that this was the same girl as the one on the beach, it was not. But it was so like her that it could be only one thing—a twin sister. There were two Lilies in the field. The night before, the nymph, was explained. But I had no time to think. Another figure appeared beside the Lily on the terrace.

It was a man, much too tall to be Conchis. At least, I presumed it was a man; perhaps “Apollo” or “Robera Foulkes"—or even “de Deukans.” I couldn’t see, because the figure was all in black, shrouded in the sun, and wearing the most sinister mask I had ever seen: the head of an enormous black dog, or jackal, with a long muzzle and high pointed ears. They stood there, the possessor and the possessed, looming death and the frail maiden. There was almost immediately, after the first visual shock, something vaguely grotesque about it; it had the overdone macabreness of a horror-magazine illustration. It certainly touched on some terrifying archetype; but it shocked common sense as well as the unconscious.

Again, I had no feeling of the supernatural, no feeling that this was more than another nasty twist in the masque; a black inversion of the scene on the beach. That does not mean I was not frightened. I was, and very frightened; but my fear came from a feeling that anything might happen. That there were no limits in this masque, no normal social laws or conventions.

Two things happened in the moments I stood there. Maria came towards me; and the two figures swiftly withdrew, as if to avoid any chance of her seeing them. Lily’s doppelganger was pulled back imperiously by the black hand on her shoulder. At the very last moment she looked down at me, but her face was expressionless.

I began to run back towards the point on the path where I could see down to the beach. I flung a look over my shoulder. The figures on the terrace had disappeared. I came to the bend from which I could see down, from where, not half a minute before, I had watched the Lily on the beach last wave. The jetty was deserted; that end of the small cove was empty. I ran further down, to the little flat space with the bench, from where I could see almost all the beach arid most of the path up. I waited in vain for the mounting bright dress to appear. I thought, she must be hiding in the little cave, or among the rocks. I turned and began to climb swiftly back towards the house.

Maria was still waiting for me at the edge of the colonnade. She had been joined by a man. I recognized Hermes, the taciturn donkeydriver. He could have been the man in black, he had the right height; but he looked unruffled, a mere bystander. I said quickly in Greek, mia stigmi , one second, and walked indoors past them. Maria was holding out an envelope, but I took no notice. Once inside I raced up the stairs to Conchis’s room. I knocked on the door. No sound. I knocked again. Then I tried the handle. It was locked.

I went back down, and paused in the music room to light a cigarette; and to take a grip on myself.

“Where is Mr. Conchis?”

“ Then eine mesa .” He’s not in. Maria raised the envelope again, but I still ignored it.

“Where’s he gone?”

“ Ephyge me ti varca .” Gone with the boat.

“Where?”

She didn’t know. I took the envelope. It had Nicholas written on it. Two folded papers.

One was a note from Conchis.

Dear Nicholas, I am obliged to ask you to entertain yourself until this evening. Unexpected business requires my presence urgently in Nauplia. M.C.

The other was a radiogram. There was no telephone or cable line to the island, but the Greek coastguard service ran a small radio station.

It had been sent from Athens the evening before. I assumed that it would explain why Conchis had had to go. But then I had the third shock in three minutes. I saw the name at the end.

It read: BACK NEXT FRIDAY STOP THREE DAYS FREE STOP AIRPORT SIX EVENING STOP PLEASE COME ALISON.

It had been sent on Saturday afternoon. I looked up at Maria and Hermes. Their eyes were blank, simply watching.

“When did you bring this?”

Hermes answered. “ Proi proi .” Early that morning.

“Who gave it to you to bring?” It was addressed to the school.

A professor. At Sarantopoulos’s, the last evening.

“Why didn’t you give it to me before?”

He shrugged and looked at Maria, and she shrugged. They seemed to imply that it had been given to Conchis. It was his fault. I read it again.

Hermes asked me if I wanted to send an answer; he was going back to the village. I said, no, no reply.

I stared at Hermes. His wall eye gave little hope. But I demanded, “Have you seen the two young ladies this morning?”

He looked at Maria. She said, Which girls? There are no girls here.

I looked at Hermes again. “You?”

“ Ochi .” His head went back.

Maria said, “ Ah, katalava, katalava .” She told Hermes I meant the little girls from the cottages. They do not come here, she said to me.

I muttered sarcastically, “Of course.” And left them.

I returned to the beach. All the time I had been watching the place where the path came up. Down there I went straight to the cave. No sign of her. A couple of minutes convinced me that she was not hiding anywhere among the rocks and trees. I looked up the little gulley. It might have been just possible to scramble up it and to get away to the east, but I found it difficult to believe. I climbed up some way to see if she was crouching behind a rock. But there was no one.

Lying in the sun, I tried to clear my mind about the two Lilys. The idea was clear. One twin came close to me, talked to me. She had a scar on her left wrist. The other did the doppelganger effects. I would never get close to her. I would see her on the terrace, in the starlight; but always at a distance. Twins—it was extraordinary, but I had begun to realize enough about Conchis to see that it was predictable. If one was very rich… why not the rarest? Why anything but the strangest and the rarest?

I tried to clear my mind about the Lily I knew, the scar-Lily, and myself. This morning, even last night, she had set out to make herself attractive to me; and if she was really simply Conchis’s mistress, I couldn’t imagine why he should allow it, and so obviously leave us alone together, unless he was much more profoundly perverted than I could bring myself seriously to suspect. In so many ways, it seemed all no more than a game. Lily gave strongly the impression that she was playing with me—amusing herself as much as acting a role at Conchis’s command. But all games, even the most literal, between a man and a woman are implicitly sexual; and I was clearly meant to feel that. If it was her job to seduce me, I should be seduced. I couldn’t do anything about it. I was a sensualist. I wanted to be seduced, to drink the wave.

Then Alison. Her telegram was like grit in the eye when one particularly wants to see clearly. I could guess what had happened. My letter of the Monday before would have arrived on Friday or Saturday in London, she would have been on a flight out of England that day, perhaps feeling fed up, half an hour to kill at Ellenikon—on impulse, a telegram. But it came like an intrusion—of dispensable reality into pleasure, of now artificial duty into instinct. I couldn’t leave the island, I couldn’t waste three days in Athens. I read the wretched thing again. Conchis must have read it too—there was no envelope. Demetriades would have opened it when it was first delivered at the school.