John Fowles - The Magus

“There’s a girl.”

“I knew it.” She sat up.

“Alison darling, for God’s sake try to understand. Listen.”

“I’m listening.” But her face was averted.

So at last I told her about Lily; though not, except obliquely, by implication, what I felt about Lily. I made it out to be an asexual thing, a fascination of the mind.

“But she attracts you the other way.”

“Allie, I can’t tell you how much I’ve hated myself this weekend. And tried to tell you everything a dozen times before. I don’t want to be attracted by her. In any way. A month, three weeks ago I couldn’t have believed it. I still don’t know what it is about her. Honestly. I only know I’m haunted, possessed by everything over there. Not just her. Something so strange is going on. And I’m… involved.” She looked unimpressed. “I’ve got to go back to the island. Because of the job. There are so many ways in which I’m not a free agent.”

“But this girl.” She was staring at the ground, picking seeds off grassheads.

“She’s irrelevant. Really. Just a very small part of it.”

“Then why all the performance?”

“You can’t understand, I’m being pulled in two.”

“She’s very pretty, isn’t she?”

“If I still didn’t care like hell for you deep down it would all have been so easy.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Yes.”

“Very pretty.”

“I suppose so.”

She buried her face in her arms. I stroked her warm shoulder.

“She’s totally unlike you. Unlike any modern girl. I can’t explain.” She turned her head away. “Alison.”

“I must seem just like a lump of dirty old kitchen salt. And she’s a beautiful cream jelly.”

I sat up. We stared in opposite directions.

“Now you’re being ridiculous.”

“Am I?”

There was a tense silence.

“Look, I’m trying desperately, for once in my miserable life, to be honest. I have no excuses. If I met this girl tomorrow, okay, I could say, I love Alison, Alison loves me, nothing doing. But I met her a fortnight ago. And I’ve got to meet her again.”

“And you don’t love Alison.”

I looked at her, trying to show her that, in my fashion… she stared away.

“Or you love me till you see a better bit of tail.”

“Don’t be crude.”

“I am crude. I think crude. I talk crude. I am crude.” She kneeled, took a breath. “So what now? I curtsey and withdraw?”

“I wish to God I wasn’t so complicated

“Complicated!” She snorted.

“Selfish.”

“That’s better.”

We were silent. Two coupled yellow butterflies flitted heavily, saggingly, past.

“All I wanted was that you should know what I am.”

“I know what you are.”

“If you did you’d have cut me out right at the beginning.”

“I still know what you are.”

“I want you to do now whatever seems best to you. Tell me to go to hell. For good. Hate me.”

“Or wait for you?”

And her cold gray eyes went through me, cutting very deep. She stood up and went to wash. It was hopeless. I couldn’t manage it, I couldn’t explain, and she could never understand. I put my clothes on and turned my back while she dressed in silence.

When she was ready, she said, “Don’t for God’s sake say any more. I can’t bear it.”

We got to Arachova about five and after a quick meal set off to drive back to Athens. I twice tried to discuss everything with her, but she wouldn’t allow it. We had said all that could be said; and she sat brooding, wordless, all the way. We came over the pass at Daphne at about eight-thirty, with the last light over the pink and amber city, the first neon signs round Syntagma and Omonia like distant jewels. I thought of where we had been that time the night before, and glanced at Alison. She was putting on lipstick. Perhaps after all there was a solution: to get her back into the hotel, make love to her, prove to her through the loins that I did love her… and why not, let her see that I might be worth suffering, just as I was and always would be. I began to talk a little, casually, about Athens; but her answers were so uninterested, so curt, that it sounded as ridiculous as it was, and I fell silent. The pink turned to violet, and soon it was night.

We arrived at the hotel in the Piraeus—I had reserved the same rooms. Alison went up while I took the car round to the garage. On the way back I saw a flower seller and bought a dozen carnations from him. I went straight to her room, and knocked on the door. I had to knock three times before she answered. She had been crying.

“I brought you some flowers.”

“I don’t want your bloody flowers.”

“Look, Alison, it’s not the end of the world.”

“Just the end of the affaire.”

I broke the silence.

“Aren’t you going to let me in?”

“Why the hell should I?”

She stood holding the door half shut, the room in darkness behind her. Her face was terrible; puffed and unforgiving; nakedly hurt.

“Just let me come in and talk to you.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“Go away.”

I pushed in past her and closed the door. She stood against the wall, staring at me. Light came up from the street, and I could see her eyes. I offered the flowers. She snatched them from my hand, went to the window and hurled them, pink heads, green stems, out into the night; remained there with her back to me.

“This experience. It’s like being halfway through a book. I can’t just throw it in the dustbin.”

“So you throw me instead.”

I went behind her to try to put my hands on her shoulders, but she jerked angrily away.

“Fuck off. Just fuck off.”

I sat on the bed and lit a cigarette. Down in the street monotonous Macedonian folk music skirled from some café loudspeaker; but we sat and stood in a strange cocoon of remoteness from even the nearest outside things.

“I came to Athens knowing I ought not to meet you. I did my damnedest that first evening and yesterday to prove to myself that I don’t have any special feeling for you any more. But it didn’t work. That’s why I talked. So ineptly. So at the wrong time.” She gave no sign of listening; I produced my trump. “Talked when I could have kept quiet. Could still be deceiving you.”

“I’m not the one who’s deceived.”

“Look—”

“And what the hell does ’special feeling' mean?” I was silent. “Christ, you’re not just afraid of the thing love. You’re even afraid of using the bloody word now.”

“I don’t know what love is.”

She spun round. “Well let me tell you. Love isn’t just what I said it was in that letter. Not turning back to look. Love is pretending to go to work but going to Victoria. To give you one last surprise, one last kiss, one last… it doesn’t matter, I saw you buying magazines. That morning I couldn’t have laughed with anyone in the world. And yet you laughed. You fucking well stood with a porter and laughed about something. That’s when I found out what love was. Seeing the one person you want to live with happy to have escaped from you.”

“But why didn’t you—”

“You know what I did? I crept away. And spent the whole godawful day curled up on our bed. Not because I loved you. Because I was so mad with rage and shame that I loved you.”

“I wasn’t to know.”

She turned away. “I wasn’t to know. Christ!” Silence hung in the air like static electricity. “Another thing. You think love is sex. Let me tell you something. If I’d wanted you just for that, I’d have left you straight after that first night.”

“My apologies.”

She looked at me, took a breath, gave a bitter little smile. “Oh God, now he’s hurt. I’m trying to tell you that I loved you for you. Not for your blasted prick.” She stared back out into the night. “Of course you’re all right in bed. But you’re not the…” she couldn’t find the words.