John Fowles - The Magus

“What is an air-hostess?”

“She looks after passengers on airplanes.”

“How do you know that? You died in 1916.”

“I asked Maurice.”

“I bet you’re good at chess.”

“I cannot play chess.”

“Why don’t you ask him about your own past?”

“I know I was born in London. We lived in a part of London called St. John’s Wood. Maurice lived in St. John’s Wood too. I studied music, I was in love with Maurice, we became engaged, but then the dreadful war came and he had to go away and I went to nurse and… I caught typhoid.” She was barely pretending this was true; simply reciting her “past,” with a small smile, in order to tease me.

I reached out and caught her hand. At the same time I heard the sound of a boat engine; she heard it as well, but her eyes gave nothing away.

She said in a small, cold voice. “Please let me go.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“No.”

“You’re hurting my wrist.”

“Promise not to go.”

There was a pause. She said, “I promise not to go.” I quickly raised her wrist and kissed it before she could react. She gave me an uncertain glance, then pulled her hand away, but not too roughly. She swiveled round and turned her back to me. I picked up a cone.

“I suppose he told you this Australian girl sent me a cable yesterday.” She did not answer. “If you said I could meet you, how shall I put it… officially?… here next weekend, or unofficially somewhere else… in the village? Anywhere. I shouldn’t go.” There was a pause. “I’m trying to be frank. Not treacherous.” Her back was silent. “I haven’t been very happy on Phraxos. Not until I came here, as a matter of fact. I’ve been, well, pretty lonely. I know I don’t love… this other girl… It’s just that she’s been the only person. That’s all.”

“Perhaps to her you seem the only person.”

“There are dozens of other men in her life. Honestly. There’ve been at least three more since I left England.” A runner ant zigzagged neurotically up the white back of her blouse and I reached and fficked it off. She must have felt me do it, but she did not turn. “It was nothing. Just an affaire.”

She didn’t speak for some time. I craned round to see her face. It was pensive. She said, “I know you did not believe what Maurice said last night. But it was true.” She glanced round solemnly at me. “I am not the real Lily. But I am not anyone impersonating the real Lily.”

“Because you’re dead?”

“Yes. I am dead.”

I crouched beside her, tapped her shoulder.

“Now listen. All this is very amusing. But it just doesn’t hold water. First there are several of you. You’ve got a twin sister, and you know it. You do this disappearing trick, and you have this charming line of mystery talk. Period dialogue and mythology and all the rest. But the fact is, there are two things you can’t conceal. You’re intelligent. And you’re as physically real as I am.” I pinched her arm, and she winced. “I don’t know whether you’re doing all this because you love the old man. Because he pays you. Because it amuses you. Because you’re his mistress. I don’t know where you and your sister and your other friends live. I don’t really care, because I think the whole idea’s original, it’s charming to be with you, I like Maurice, I think this is all fun… but don’t let’s take it all so bloody seriously. Play your charade. But for Christ’s sake don’t try to explain it.”

I knew I had called her bluff then; regained the initiative. I stood up behind her and lit a cigarette. She sat, looking down in front of her. After a moment her face went down on her knees. The boat came into the cove; Conchis had returned. I waited, thinking that I ought to have realized that a little force would do the trick. She was silent a long time. Then her shoulders gave a little shake. She was pretending to cry.

“Sorry. No go.”

She stared round. Her eyes were full of very real tears.

I knelt beside her.

She gave a rueful smile and brushed her eyes with the back of her wrist. I put my hand on her shoulder. I could feel the warmth of her skin through the linen; reached in my pocket and found a handkerchief. “Here.” She dabbed at her eyes, and looked at me, with a pleading simplicity.

“I tried. I tried very hard.”

“You’re wonderful… you’ve no idea how strange this experience has been. I mean, beautifully strange. Only, you know, it’s one’s sense of reality. It’s like gravity. One can resist it only so long.”

She handed me back my handkerchief, and we stood up, very close together. I knew I wanted very much to kiss her, to hold her. She looked at me, submissively.

“A truce?”

“A truce.”

“I want you to say nothing for… ten minutes. A little walk, if you like.”

“I like.”

“Nothing—not a word?”

“I promise. If you—”

But her warning finger was towards my lips. We turned and began to walk up the slope. After a time I took her hand.

I kept my side of the promise as firmly as I kept hold of her hand. She led me up through the trees to a point higher than where I had forced my way over the gulley the week before, to where there was a path across, with some rough-hewn steps. I had to let go of her hand because of the narrowness of the path, but at the top of the other side she waited and held it out for me to take again. We went over a rise and there, on the upper slope of a little hollow, stood a statue. I recognized it at once. It was a copy of the famous Poseidon fished out of the sea near Euboea at the beginning of the century. I had a postcard of it in my room. The superb man stood on a short raised floor of natural rock that had been roughly leveled off, his legs astride, his majestic forearm pointing south to the sea, as inscrutably royal, as mercilessly divine as any artifact in the history of man; a thing as modern as Henry Moore and as old as the rock it stood on. Even then I was still surprised that Conchis had not shown it to me before; I knew a replica like that must have cost a small fortune; and to keep it so casually, so in a corner, unspoken of… again I was reminded of de Deukans; and of that great dramatic skill, the art of timing one’s surprises.

We stood and looked at it. She smiled at my impressed face, then led me to a wooden seat under an almond tree on the slope behind the statue. One could see the distant sea over the treetops, but the statue was invisible to anyone close to the shore. We sat down in the shade. I tried to keep her hand, but she curled her legs up and sat twisted towards me with her arm along the back of the seat. I looked at my watch, then at her. The ten minutes was up; and she had recovered her poise, though like a landscape after rain her face seemed less aloof, forever less dry.

“May I talk?”

“If you want to.”

“You’d rather I didn’t.”

“Sometimes being together is nicer than talking together.”

“I only want to talk because it gives me an excuse to look at you.”

“Why not just look?”

I took up the same position as she had, and we stared at each other along the back of the seat. Her look was so steady, and in a way so newly interested in me, so unmasked, that it made me look down.

“I’m no good at the staring game.”

She shut her eyes then, with a faint smile, and it seemed to me that her face was slightly held out in the dappled shade for me to kiss. I bent forward. But she suddenly opened her eyes; they took the color of the light, were green for a moment too; we stared at each other, poised, very close, and then her hand came out and gently pushed me away.

“No.”

“Please.”