John Fowles - The Magus

I let a minute pass, jotting down the addresses she had shown me. The Negro had gone from the carob. But when I reached the statue I saw him standing beyond it among the trees, still watching to make sure that I returned to the house. It seemed clear that that was the real direction in which they had to go to reach their hiding place; and that it must be to the east, beyond the cottages. With a sarcastic wave I turned to the left over the gulley; and soon I was sitting down under the colonnade.

I had a quick, abstemious lunch, pouring the retsina into a pot with a tired-looking pelargonium in it; went upstairs, put my things in the dufflebag and brought it down. The beady-eyed Modigliani stared; but I went to the curiosa cabinet and examined Lily’s photo, held it to the light, and now I looked at it very closely again I thought I could see that it had been faked—some subtly smudged outlines, an overdarkening of the shadows.

I came to the statue. Once again the wretched Negro stood in my path. This time he was on the other side of the gulley, maskless, and when I came to the edge of it, on the house side, he waved his hand forbiddingly backwards and forwards a couple of times. He was some twenty yards away, and for the first time I realized he had a small moustache; and that he was younger and less brutish than I had thought before. I stood staring sulkily at him, the dufflebag hanging by my side. He put up both hands, fingers outstretched.

I gave him the coldest look I could, then shrugged and sat down against a tree, where I could watch him. He folded his arms again over his chest as if he really were a scimitared janissary at the gates of the imperial harem; slapped the side of his face when a fly landed on it. Occasionally he looked at me, expressionlessly, but most of the time he watched down the hill.

Suddenly there was a whistle, a blown whistle, from the direction of the cliffs. The Negro waited a minute more, then walked away up past the statue and out of sight.

I crossed the gulley and went fast down the hill to the place where we had sat. I had been reduced to the state when it was no longer a question of whether any story at Bourani could be absolutely believed, but of whether it could be absolutely disbelieved. I knew I wanted this one to be true, and that was dangerous. I still had some questions, and I was going to still watch her like a lynx. But my instinct told me I was a lynx moving into a landscape where the mists were rapidly thinning.

Finding her at the rug again seemed a test of her truth. I came over the small rise, and there she was. She made a little concealed praying movement, gladness that I had come. She hadn’t changed her clothes, but her hair was tied loosely back at the nape with a blue ribbon.

“What was the whistle?”

She whispered. “Maurice. He is here. He’s gone now.” She jumped up. “Come and look.”

She led me through the trees to the clifftop. I thought for a mad moment that she was going to show me Conchis’s retreating back. But she stopped under the branches of the last pine and pointed. Right in the south, almost hull down, a line of ships steamed east across the Aegean between Malea and Skyli: a carrier, a cruiser, four destroyers, another ship, intent on some new Troy.

I glanced down at her long pink skirt, her ridiculously oldfashioned shoes, and then back at those pale gray shapes on the world’s blue rim. Thousands of gum-chewing, contraceptive-carrying men, more thirty or forty years away than thirty or forty miles, as if we were looking into the future, not into the south.

She said, “Our being here. Their being there.”

I looked again at her profile; then to the distant fleet, and weighed them in the balance; made her the victress.

“Tell me what’s happened.”

We walked back through the trees. “I’ve told him that you’re almost convinced now that I am in some way in his sinister power… that you don’t really know whether it’s hypnosis or schizophrenia or what. And that you’re falling in love with me. All according to the script.”

“What did he say?”

She sat down on the rug and looked up.

“He wants us to meet during the week. Secretly. As if secretly.” But she seemed worried. “The only thing is—he assured me that it was the last time I’d have to play a 'love' scene with you.” A moment of silence. “The end of act one. His words.”

“And act two?”

“I think next weekend he will want me to turn against you.”

“This meeting?”

“He told me to try Wednesday. Do you know Moutsa? The little chapel?”

“What time?”

“Dusk. Half-past eight?” I nodded. She turned, a sudden vivacity. “I forgot to tell you. I think there’s someone at your school who spies on you for Maurice. Another master?”

“Oh?”

“Maurice told us one day you were very standoffish with the other masters. That they didn’t like you.”

I thought at once of Demetriades; of how, when I reflected, it was peculiar that such a gossip should have kept my trips to Bourani so secret. Besides, I was standoffish, and he was the only other master I was ever frequently with, or spoke to.

I began my supplementary cross-examination. What did the sisters do during the week? They went to Athens or to Nauplia, to the yacht. Maurice ]eft them very much to their own devices. What about Foulkes and the girl? But I found that she knew nothing about them, though she had guessed from my face that evening that I had seen de Deukans. I asked what would have happened if I had gone into the music room that first Sunday. They had expected I would; she had had all her speeches, variations of those she had used the next weekend, ready. Where had June worked in England? At a publisher’s. Had they discovered anything from “Apollo” and the other actor? Only that “they must not be frightened"—the man had left her as soon as they entered the trees. Who had held the torches? She thought Maria and Hermes. Maria? As ungiving as a stone. What did she think of the story of Conchis’s life? Like me, she could only half believe it. What did her mother think? They’d told her they were still rehearsing… “she’d only get into a useless tizzy.” How long did the contracts last? Till the end of October. I suddenly saw a new possibility—that when term ended Conchis might invite me to spend my holidays at Bourani, a limitless black and gold stretch of masque.

“Mitford. You know he’s a mess, you said so. But you never met him.”

“Maurice. He described him to us.” All through the questions she kept her eyes solemnly on mine.

“And what happened last year?”

“No. Except that it was a failure of some kind.” I produced my last and key question.

“That theatre at Canonbury.”

“The Tower?”

“Yes. Isn’t there a little pub round the corner where people go afterwards? I’ve forgotten its name.” I had; but I knew if she told it to me, I would remember.

“The Beggar’s Broom?” She seemed delighted. “Do you know it?” I thought of a warm-armed Danish girl called Kirsten; a brown bar with people’s signatures scrawled on the ceiling.

“Not really. But I’m so glad you do.”

Our eyes met, amused and relieved that the test was passed.

“You were beginning to frighten me as much as Maurice.”

I lay back. The hot wind fretted the branches.

“Don’t you want to frighten me now?”

She shook her head; lay back as well, and we stared up at the sky through a long silence. Then she said, “Tell me about Nicholas.”

So we talked about Nicholas: his family, his ambitions and his failings. The third person was right, because I presented a sort of ideal self to her, a victim of circumstances, a mixture of attractive raffishness and essential inner decency. I wanted to kill Alison off in her mind, and confessed to a “rather messy affaire” that had made me leave England.