John Fowles - The Magus

“We didn’t write the caption.”

“So I guessed.”

The other cutting was from the Cinema Trade News . It repeated, in Americanese, what she had just told me.

“Oh and this. My mother.” She showed me a snapshot from the wallet; a woman with fluffy hair in a deckchair in a garden, a dumber spaniel beside her. I could see another photo and I made her let me look at it: a man in a sports shirt, a nervous and intelligent face; he seemed about thirty-five.

“Who’s this?”

“Someone.”

“Are you engaged?”

She shook her head, very vehemently; and took the photo back.

“We had screen tests. Some woman Maurice knew gave us lessons in deportment. Fittings.” She flicked her dress. “All this. Then in March we came out. Maurice met us in Athens and said the rest of the company wouldn’t assemble for a fortnight. We didn’t come here. He took us on a cruise with him. Mykonos, Crete, and so on. He’s got a beautiful yacht.”

“Ah. I was right.”

“No honestly. He never brings it here.” Her look was too quick, too open for me not to believe.

“Where then?”

“It’s usually at Nauplia.”

“In Athens—you stayed in his house?”

“I don’t think he’s got one there. He says he hasn’t. We always stay at the Grande Bretagne.”

“No office?”

“I know.” She gave a self-accusing shrug. “But you see, we understood only the location shooting would take place here. And the interiors in Beirut. It didn’t really seem funny. We met two men. Two Greeks. You saw them… that night.”

“I was going to ask you about that.”

She looked embarrassed. “We honestly didn’t know he was going to be… as he was. That was Maurice’s sense of humor.”

I squinnied at her. “Humor?”

“I know. It’s partly because of that that we’re telling you all this.” Her eyes begged for belief; and imperceptibly I began to stop only pretending to believe her. I knew documents can lie, voices can lie, even tones of voice can lie. But there is something naked about eyes; they seem the only organs of the human body that have never really learnt to dissimulate. She said, “See if you can find out about them. Could you? At your school? One’s name’s Harry Tsimbou. In Athens we understood he was going to be the Greek poet. And the other’s called Yanni Papaioannou. He was introduced as the director. Well, in Athens they both seemed excited about the film. You know, we were only there one night, we had dinner with them, and then we were off in the yacht.”

“With these two men?”

“Just with Maurice. They were to come straight here. We thought it was odd that there was so little publicity, but they even had a reason for that. Apparently here if you say you’re going to make a film you get thousands of extras turning up in the hope of a job.”

“Okay. You came here.”

“That’s when the madness began. We’d been here two days. We both realized there was something different about Maurice. I mean, I’ve missed a lot out. Things on the yacht. He would never tell us about his past. One day we asked him point-blank—and he refused point-blank. But we had wonderful evenings with him—enormous arguments. Oh—about life, love, literature. Everything.”

She looked at me as if I might be blaming her for liking him. I said, “You arrived here.”

“I think the first thing was—we wanted to go to the village. We came here from Nauplia. Not Athens. But he said no, he wanted the film made as quietly as possible. But it was too quiet. There was no one else here, no sign of generators, lights, kliegs, all the things they’d need. And Maurice was strange. Watching us. There was something rather frightening in the way he would smile. As if he knew something we didn’t. And didn’t have to hide it any more.”

“I know that exactly.”

“It was the second, third afternoon here. June—I was sleeping—tried to go for a walk. She got to the gate and suddenly this silent Negro stepped out in the path and stopped her. He wouldn’t answer her. Of course she was scared. She came straight back and we went to Maurice.” She stared out to sea, then back at me. “Well then he told us. There wasn’t going to be a film. He wanted us to help him conduct what he called an experiment in mystification. That was the phrase he used. For the first time he mentioned you. He said that soon a young Englishman would be coming to Bourani and that he was going to mount a kind of play involving you, in which we were to have parts rather like the ones in the original story—in Three Hearts .”

“But Christ almighty, you must have—”

“Of course .” She stood up, and began to pace the little rug. “I know we were mad.” She brushed the hair back from her cheeks, and looked down at me. “But you must realize that by that time we’d both fallen intellectually under his spell. He explained this thing as something, I don’t know, so strange, so new. A fantastic extension of the Stanislavski method. He said you were to be like a man following a mysterious voice, voices, through a forest. A game withtwo tyrannesses and a victim. He gave us all sorts of parallels.”

“But where does it all lead?”

“It’s all connected—he says it’s all connected—with what he told us at the end of the story about Seidevarre. About the need for a mystery in life? From the very beginning he assured us that at the end we should all drop our masks and he would ask us—you as well as us—lots of questions about what we felt during the experiment. Sometimes he gets very abstruse. You know, scientific and medical jargon.” She smiled. “June says we’re the best paid laboratory assistants in Europe.”

“But you still must have—”

“Feared a fate worse than death? Not really. Partly because Maurice was so eager that we should do it. He said his whole life and happiness depended on it. At one point he even offered to give us a thousand pounds more each.” She stood still, and stared down at me. “Arid never, never the smallest sign of what we were obviously looking for.”

“You said yes again?”

“After a night of talking it over with June. A qualified yes.” She sat down beside me and smiled. “You’ve no idea how sure we’ve been growing that you were helping him to deceive us. That was another thing.”

“It must have been obvious I was no actor.”

“It wasn’t. I thought you were brilliant. Acting as if you couldn’t act.” She turned and lay on her stomach. “Well—we think the story about mystification was just another blind. According to the script we deceive you. But the deceiving deceives us even more.”

“This script?”

“It doesn’t help explain anything. Every week he tells us what we shall do next weekend. In terms of entries and exits. The sort of atmosphere to create. Sometimes lines. But he lets us improvise a lot. All along he says that if things go in some slightly different way it doesn’t really matter. As long as we keep to the main development.”

“That talk about God the other night?”

“They were lines I’d learnt.”

I looked down. “You started telling me all this because you’re frightened.”

She nodded, but seemed for a moment at a loss for words.

“To begin with there was no talk about getting you to fall in love with me except in a very distant nineteen-fifteeny sort of way. Then by that second week Maurice persuaded me that I had to make some compromise between my 1915 false self and your 1953 true one. He asked me if I’d mind kissing you.” She shrugged. “One’s kissed men onstage. I said, no, if it was absolutely necessary. That second Sunday I hadn’t decided. That’s why I put on that dreadful act.”