John Fowles - The Magus

“It’s so nice.”

“Please don’t. Not because it isn’t nice.”

Gently, firmly she pushed my hand out, then sat up; then stood, turned, buttoned her blouse, and swiftly knelt beside me, her face in her hands, elbows on her knees. I stroked her hair.

“I’m not using you.”

“I know you aren’t.”

“Your body’s so pretty. It’s meant to be caressed.”

She took my hand and kissed it; then let herself be cradled again.

She said, “Talk to me.”

“What about?”

“About England. About Oxford, about anything.”

So I talked; and she was touchingly like a child, lying there with her eyes closed, occasionally asking a question, sometimes saying little bits about herself, but mainly content to listen. The sky became dark. I kissed her once or twice, but it became a silent closeness, a lying touching, in which time soundlessly hurtled on.

She made me hold my wrist so that she could see the dial. It was five to eleven. “I must go.”

“Just a few minutes more.”

“I shouldn’t…” but even while she was saying it her arms came up and around me and as if she had been restraining herself all evening she suddenly began to kiss me with passion. If at the first moment it seemed a degree desperate, more a determination than a desire to be passionate, it soon became real. The kiss went on and on, our positions changed, so that she was lying half on top of me. I could feel rising within me the exasperation of sexual desire, of the feel of encumbering clothes, everything that stands between skin and skin. Finally we were half struggling, half kissing. And then she was pushing, pulling herself away, on her feet, and shrill shock, the whistle sounded. I sprang up and caught her by the arms.

“Why did you do that?”

She gave me a racked look, mixed reproach and asking for forgiveness.

“You make me wild.”

It seemed torn out of her, a kind of self-horror. Then she was in my arms again, being gripped frantically to me and wanting to be gripped, a brutally fierce kiss. But we both heard the quick pad of the running feet. She twisted round and free. Said in a low voice to him, “Stop there.” He rocked on his feet, as if in two minds, then stood twenty yards away.

I whispered, “I love you. I’m mad about you.”

She turned back to me; her hair had fallen loose and she looked strange, struck silent, her eyes so intense; as if she had begun to suspect me all over again. I took her face in my hands and drew her a little towards me, then whispered the words again; begging her to believe.

“I love you.”

She bowed her head, then pulled on her cardigan, saying nothing, but standing so close that it said everything. I pulled her against me for a moment, and then she answered, in a voice so low I hardly heard.

“I want you to love me.”

A last moment; then she ran past the Negro and down through the trees towards the shingle of the beach. For an instant the mothlike whiteness of her skirt showed; was swallowed up in darkness.

The Negro leaned against a pine. He was without his mask and I felt more relaxed with him than before; sure that I was the tricker this time, he the tricked.

“Would you like a cigarette?”

No answer.

“Just to show there are no hard feelings.”

Suddenly he switched a torch on; only for a second, but it dazzled me; and it was plainly to silence my tongue.

“Thanks.”

For two or three minutes we stood in dense darkness and silence. I smoked, he watched.

Then the torch went on again, but this time it pointed at a place in front of my feet, then moved towards the north. He was telling me to go home.

“I am dismissed?”

Again the torch pointed, swept sideways.

I began to walk in the direction that would bring me to the path to the central ridge. He followed me, some thirty or forty yards behind. I halted and turned.

“Is this really necessary?”

But the torch flicked on again, and the beam pushed me away. I shrugged; continued. She loved me, she wanted me; and I carried the certainty of it inside me like alcohol. When we got to the path, and I turned up to the north, he stopped. Some forty yards later I looked back and he was still standing there.

I went on without stopping for two hundred yards or so. It was a night with the thinnest of new moons; too dark to encourage a roundabout return to Bourani. I waited for the sound of a boat engine. And this time, in a few minutes, it came from the direction of the private beach; then headed east towards Nauplia.

As I climbed the long path through the trees I thought of Julie; of her body, her mouth, a feeling that in another few minutes she would have given way… and my mind wandered lubriciously off to a Julie trained by familiarity, by love of me to do all those things that Alison did; all Alison’s semi-professional skill with Julie’s elegance, taste and intelligence. I was torn between wanting her and not wanting her; between doing things at my tempo and doing them at hers; happily torn.

Walking on I began to think over the old center to the whole enigma—Conchis, and his purposes. If you have a private menagerie your concern is to keep the animals in, not to dictate exactly what they do inside the cage. He constructed bars around us, subtle psychosexual bars that kept us chained to Bourani. He was like some Elizabethan nobleman. We were his Earl of Leicester’s troupe, his very private company; but he might well have incorporated the Heisenberg principle into his masque, so that much of it was indeterminate, both to him as observer-voyeur and to us as observed human particles. One thing was certain: to use us so he must despise us. In spite of Julie’s theory, it rankled in me that he called me unimaginative. I guessed that he partly wanted to taunt us with a false contrast between an all-wise Europe and a naïve England. In spite of all his gnomic cant he was like so many other Europeans, quite unable to understand the emotional depths and subtleties of the English attitude to life. He thought the girls and I were green, innocents; but we could outperifidy his perfidy, and precisely because we were English: born with masks and bred to lie.

I came towards the main ridge. As I walked I overturned a loose stone here and there, but otherwise the landscape was totally silent. Far below, over the crumpled gray velvet of the outstretched pinetops, the sea glistened obscurely under the spangled sky. The world belonged to night.

The trees thinned out where the ground rose steeply to-the small bluff that marked the south side of the main ridge. I paused a moment for breath and turned to look back down towards Bourani; glanced at my watch. It was just after midnight. The whole island was asleep. Somewhere Lily was, like me, staring at the silver nailparing of a moon, perhaps feeling that same sense of existential solitude, the being and being alone in a universe, that still nights sometimes give.

Then from behind me, from somewhere up on the ridge, I heard a sound. A very small sound, but enough to make me step swiftly off the path into the cover of a pine. Someone or something up there had overturned a stone. A pause of fifteen seconds or more. Then I froze; both with shock and as a precaution.

A man was standing on top of the bluff, ashily silhouetted against the night sky. Then a second man, and a third. I could hear the faint noise of their feet on the rock, the muffled clink of something metallic. Then, like magic, there were six. Six gray shadows standing along the skyline. One of them raised an arm and pointed; but I heard no sound of voices. Islanders? But they hardly ever used the central ridge in summer; and never at that time of night. In any case I suddenly realized what they were. They were soldiers. I could just see the indistinct outlines of guns, the dull sheen of a helmet.