John Fowles: The Magus

“You poor kid.”

“I knew if it was Pete’s he wouldn’t want it. And if it wasn’t his he Wouldn’t have it. So.”

“Weren’t you—”

“I didn’t want a baby. It would have got in the way.” But she added more gently, “Yes, I was.”

“And still?”

A silence, a small shrug.

“Sometimes.”

I couldn’t see her face. We sat in silence, close and warm, both aware that we were close and aware that we were embarrassed by the implications of this talk about children. In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.

One evening we went to see Carne’s old film Quai des Brumes . She was crying when we came out and she began to cry again when we were in bed. She sensed my disapproval.

“You’re not me. You can’t feel like I feel.”

“I can feel.”

“No you can’t. You just choose not to feel or something, and everything’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. It’s just not so bad.”

“That film made me feel what I feel about everything. There isn’t any meaning. You try and try to be happy and then something chance happens and it’s all gone. It’s because we don’t believe in a life after death.”

“Not don’t. Can’t.”

“Every time you go out and I’m not with you I think you may die. I think about dying every day. Every time I have you, I think this is one in the eye for death. You know, you’ve got a lot of money and the shops are going to shut in an hour. It’s sick, but you’ve got to spend. Does that make sense?”

“Of course. The bomb.”

She lay smoking.

“It’s not the bomb. It’s us.”

She didn’t fall for the solitary heart; she had a nose for emotional blackmail. She thought it must be nice to be totally alone in the world, to have no family ties. When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends—using my favorite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world—she just laughed. “You like it,” she said. “You say you’re isolated, boyo, but you really think you’re different.” She broke my hurt silence by saying, too late, “You are different.”

“And isolated.”

She shrugged. “Marry someone. Marry me.”

She said it as if she had suggested I try an aspirin for a headache. I kept my eyes on the road.

“You’re going to marry Pete.”

“And you wouldn’t marry me because I’m a whore and a colonial.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use that word.”

“And you wish I wouldn’t use that word.”

Always we edged away from the brink of the future. We talked about a future, about living in a cottage, where I should write, about buying a jeep and crossing Australia. “When we’re in Alice Springs…” became a sort of joke—in never-never land.

One day drifted and melted into another. I knew the affaire was like no other I had been through. Apart from anything else it was so much happier physically. Out of bed I felt I was teaching her, anglicizing her accent, polishing off her roughnesses, her provincialisms; in bed she did the teaching. We knew this reciprocity without being able, perhaps because we were both single children, to analyze it. We both had something to give and to gain… and at the same time a physical common ground, the same appetites, the same tastes, the same freedom from inhibition. She was teaching me other things, besides the art of love; but that is how I thought of it at the time.

I remember one day when we were standing in one of the rooms at the Tate. Alison was leaning slightly against me, holding my hand, looking in her childish sweet-sucking way at a Renoir. I suddenly had a feeling that we were one body, one person, even there; that if she had disappeared it would have been as if I had lost half of myself. A terrible deathlike feeling, which anyone less cerebral and self-absorbed than I was then would have realized was simply love. I thought it was desire. I drove her straight home and tore her clothes off.

Another day, in Jermyn Street, we ran into Billy Whyte, an Old Etonian I had known quite well at Magdalen; he’d been one of the Hommes Révoltés. He was pleasant enough, not in the least snobbish—Etonians very seldom are—but he carried with him, perhaps in spite of himself, an unsloughable air of high caste, of constant contact with the nicest best people, of impeccable upper-class taste in facial exPression, clothes, vocabulary. We went off to an oyster bar; he’d just heard the first Colchesters of the season were in. Alison said very little, but I was embarrassed by her, by her accent, by the difference between her and one or two debs who were sitting near us. She left us for a moment when Billy poured the last of the Muscadet.

“Nice girl, dear boy.”

“Oh…” I shrugged. “You know.”

“Most attractive.”

“Cheaper than central heating.”

“I’m sure.”

But I knew what he was thinking.

Alison was very silent after we left him. We were driving up to Hampstead to see a film. I glanced at her sullen face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Sometimes you sound so mean, you upper-class Poms.”

“I’m not upper-class. I’m middle-class.”

“Upper, middle—God, who cares.”

I drove some way before she spoke again.

“You treated me as if I didn’t really belong to you.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“As if I’m a bloody abo.”

“Rubbish.”

“In case my pants fell down or something.”

“It’s so difficult to explain.”

“Not to me, sport. Not to me.”

One day she said, “I’ve got to go for my interview tomorrow.”

“Do you want to go?”

“Do you want me to go?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. You haven’t got to make up your mind.”

“It’ll do me good if I get accepted. Just to know I’m accepted.”

She changed the subject; and I could have refused to change the subject. But I didn’t.

Then, the very next day, I too had a letter about an interview. Alison’s took place—she thought she had done well. Three days later she got a letter saying that she had been accepted for training, to start in October.

I had my interview, with a board of urbane culture-organizers. She met me outside and we went and had an awkward meal, like two strangers, in an Italian restaurant. She had a gray, tired face, and her cheeks looked baggy. I asked her what she’d been doing while I was away.

“Writing a letter.”

“To them?”

“Yes.”

“Saying?”

“What do you think I said?”

“You accepted.”

There was a difficult pause. I knew what she wanted me to say, but I couldn’t say it. I felt as a sleepwalker must feel when he wakes up at the end of the roof parapet. I wasn’t ready for marriage, for settling down. I wasn’t psychologically close enough to her; something I couldn’t define, obscure, monstrous, lay between us, and this obscure monstrous thing emanated from her, not from me.

“Some of their flights go via Athens. If you’re in Greece we can meet. Maybe you’ll be in London. Anyway.”

We began to plan how we would live if I didn’t get the job in Greece.

But I did. A letter came, saying my name had been selected to be forwarded to the School Board in Athens. This was “virtually a formality.” I should be expected in Greece about the beginning of October.

I showed Alison the letter as soon as I had climbed the stairs back to the fiat, and watched her read it. I was looking for regret, but I couldn’t see it. She kissed me.

“I told you.”

“I know.”

“Let’s celebrate. Let’s go out in the country.”

I let her carry me away. She wouldn’t take it seriously, and I was too much of a coward to stop and think why I was secretly hurt by her refusing to take it seriously. So we went out into the country, and when we came back we went to see a film and later went dancing in Soho; and still she wouldn’t take it seriously. But then, late, after love, we couldn’t sleep, and we had to take it seriously.