John Fowles - The Magus

“The girl you were going to meet?”

“It was cowardice. You know, letters… being lonely here. I told you. I ought never to have let it drag on so long. It could never have come to anything.”

I gave her an edited version of the relationship; one in which Alison got less than her due and I got a good deal more; but in which the main blame was put on hazard, on fate, on elective affinity, the feeling one had that one liked some people and loved others.

“If I hadn’t been here… would you have gone and met her?”

“Probably.” She looked pensive. “Shouldn’t I have said that?”

She nodded. “It’s just that I can’t stand dishonesty in personal relationships.”

“Nor can I. That’s why I’ve broken off this other thing.”

She sat up and smoothed down her skirt. “I think I shall go wild somethnes. All this sun and sea and never being able to really enjoy it. How women lived fifty years ago in these miserable…” But she looked at me, saw by my eyes I wasn’t listening, and stopped.

I said, “How long have we got?”

“Till four.”

“What happens then?”

“You must go.”

“I want to kiss you.”

She was silent. Then she said quietly, “Don’t you want to know about the real me?”

“If you lie back.”

So she turned and lay flat on her stomach again, with her head pillowed on her arms. She talked about her mother, their life in Dorset, her own boredom with it; about her scholarship to Cambridge, acting, and finally, about the man in the photograph. He had been a don, a mathematician, at Sidney Sussex. Fifteen years older than Julie; married and separated; and they had had not an affaire, but a relationship “too peculiar and too sad to talk about.”

I asked what made it so sad.

“Physical things.” She stared into the ground, chin on arms. “Being too similar. One day I realized we were driving each other mad. Torturing each other instead of helping each other.”

“Was he cut up?”

“Yes.”

“And you?”

“Of course.” She looked sideways. “I loved him.” Her tone made me feel crass, and I let the silence come before I spoke again.

“No one else?”

“No one who matters.” After a moment or two she turned round on her back, and spoke at the sky. “I think intelligence is terrible. It magnifies all one’s faults. Complicates things that ought to be simple.”

“One can learn to simplify.”

She said nothing. I moved a little closer, and began to caress, with a timidity I felt but would in any case have simulated, the side of her face, her cheek. She closed her eyes, and I traced the lines of the eyelids with my forefingers; then the mouth, then kissed the unresponding mouth, then the side of the neck and the top of the shoulder where the white-trimmed collar gaped a little; then remained looking down. It seemed to me a face one could never tire of, an eternal source of desire, of love, of the will to protect; without physical or psycho- logical flaw. She opened her eyes and I could see in them something still reserved, unsure, not giving.

So we lay side by side, our faces only two feet apart, staring at each other. She reached out her hand and took mine, and we interlocked fingers, twisted them, wrestled gently, mock-coupled. Some of her reserve melted away, and I could see that she took this thing, this exchange of trivial caress, with a seriousness no other girl I had ever met had felt—or had the independence of mind to show. I saw in Julie fear of man and something that hinted at craving for him. Her natural aloofness and coolness suddenly seemed rather pitiable, a mere social equivalent of some neurosis about frigidity. I kissed her hand.

She allowed it, and then, withdrawing her hand, suddenly turned her back on me.

“What’s wrong?”

She spoke in a whisper. “When I was thirteen I was—well the stock euphemism is…” her voice sank lower than the wind “… interfered with.”

It was like hitting an air-pocket; my mind plunged—some terrible wound, some physical incapacity… I stared at the back of her head. She kept her face averted. “I’ve rationalized it and rationalized it, I know it’s just biology. Mechanism. But I’ve…” her voice trailed away.

I kissed her shoulder through the fabric.

“It’s as if—with even the nicest men, men like you—I can’t help suspecting that they’re just using me. As if everyone else was born able to distinguish love and lust. But I wasn’t.” She lay curled up, head on hand. “I’m so sorry. I’m not abnormal. If you could just be patient with me.”

“Infinitely patient.”

“You’re only the second man I’ve ever told this to.”

I took her hand and kissed it again.

There was a silence. She turned, gave me a little self-ashamed smile. Her cheeks were red. “I think about you all the time.”

“I think about you all the time.”

For a long time we said nothing; lay in the warmth of a new closeness.

Then the bell rang.

I said, “To hell with it. I’m not going.”

“You must.”

“No.”

“Please.” Such tender regret in her eyes. “If we’re going to go on.”

“I’ll come tomorrow.”

“We’re going away for two days.”

“To Nauplia?”

“I suppose.”

“There’s so much.”

“I know.”

Silence; eyes.

The bell rang again: dang, dang, dang, dang, dang.

She stood up.

“Julie.”

“Nicholas.”

“It seems so simple to me.”

“You must teach me. I’ll be your pupil.”

“Wednesday?”

“I promise.”

We stared at each other intensely for a moment; then I picked up my bag and set off. After a few paces I looked back, and she touched her fingers to her lips. And later still, waved. Twice, three times, till I went out of sight.

I got to the house. Hermes the donkey driver was waiting there solemnly, but with no air of urgency. He wanted to know if I had my prammata , my things: he had to lock up.

I said impatiently, I have them.

Did I want to ride his donkey back?

No.

I went quickly to the gate. Once outside I struck off to the northeast, until I came to a place where I could see the bluff that ran inland along the eastern boundary, and the bay with the three cottages. I leant against a tree, and waited for a pink or a black shape to come running through the trees towards the cottages; or for the sound of a boat beyond Bourani, or down at Moutsa.

But the bay lay silent, the afternoon sea stretched out down towards Crete, ninety miles away. The fleet had disappeared. I watched the steepling shadows thrown by some cypresses near the cottages lengthen, stab into the golden earth. An hour passed. And then a small caïque did come chugging round the headland to the east of the bay. It looked like a small island boat. I could make out a man with a white shirt aboard. It disappeared behind the cliffs of Bourani; but it did not seem to halt, and a quarter of an hour later I could tell it was still heading east, beyond Moutsa. By then I was resigned to not seeing Lily. Perhaps the caïque had picked them up, although it was the hour when the island fishermen often set out for their night’s work.

So I walked back to the school, temporarily detumescent, but buoyed on by a deep excitement; a clear glimpse of a profound future happiness; of at last having in my hand, after a long run of low cards, the joker and all four aces. Or three, at any rate.

That same Sunday evening I threw away the thread in the envelope; and I composed letters to Mrs. Holmes at Cerne Abbas, to Mr. P. J. Fearn, and the headmistress of the grammar school. In the first I explained that I had met Julie and June in connection with their film; that the local village schoolmaster had asked me to find a rural school in England that would provide “pen pals"; and that the two girls had suggested that I should write to their mother and ask her to put me in touch with the primary school at Cerne Abbas—and as soon as possible, as our term was ending shortly. In the second I said that I wanted to open an account and that I had been recommended by two customers at the branch. In the third I gave myself the principalship of a language school opening in the autumn in Athens; a Miss Julie Holmes had applied for a post.