The Magus

by John Robert Fowles

I ate my sandwich, and then grinned at him.

  “Every day I spend here I feel my legs get a little longer. There’s so much pulling on them.”

  He looked amazed, even a shade irritated. “I am most certainly not pulling your leg at the moment. Far from it.”

  “I think you are. But I don’t mind.”

  He pushed his chair away from the table and made a new gesture; pressing his hands to his temples, as if he had been guilty of some terrible mistake. It was right out of character; and I knew he was acting.

  “I was so sure that you had understood by now.”

  “I think I have.”

  He gave me a piercing look I was meant to believe, and didn’t.

  “There are personal reasons I cannot go into now why I should—even if I did not love her as a daughter—feel the gravest responsibility for the unfortunate creature you have been with today.” He poured hot water into the silver teapot. “She is one of the principal, the principal reason why I come to Bourani and its isolation. I thought you had realized that by now.”

  “Of course I had… in a way.”

  “This is the one place where the poor child can roam a little and indulge her fantasies.” I was thinking back fast—what had she said… I owe him so much… I can’t explain… I can’t lie to him. I thought, the cunning little bitch; they’re throwing me backwards and forwards like a ball. I felt annoyed again, and at the same time fascinated. I smiled.

  “Are you trying to tell me she’s mad?”

  “Mad is a meaningless non-medical word. She suffers from schizophrenia.”

  “So she believes herself to be your long-dead fiancée?”

  “I gave her that role. It was deliberately induced. It is quite harmless and she enjoys playing it. It is in some of her other roles that she is not so harmless.”

  “Roles?”

  “Wait.” He disappeared indoors and came back a minute later with a book. “This is a standard textbook on psychiatry.” He searched for a moment. “Allow me to read a passage. ‘One of the defining characteristics of schizophrenia is the formation of delusions which may be elaborate and systematic, or bizarre and incongruous.’” He looked up at me. “Lily falls into the first category.” He went on reading. “‘They, these delusions, have in common the same tendency to relate always to the patient; they often incorporate elements of popular prejudice against certain groups of activities; and they take the general form of self-glorification or feelings of persecution. One patient may believe she is Cleopatra, and will expect all around her to conform to her belief, while another may believe that her own family have decided to murder her and will therefore make even their most innocent and sympathetic statements and actions conform to her fundamental delusion.’ And here. ‘There are frequently large areas of consciousness untouched by the delusion. In all that concerns them, the patient may seem, to an observer who knows the full truth, bewilderingly sensible and logical.’”

  He took a gold pencil from his pocket, marked the passages he had read and passed the open book over the table to me. I glanced at the book, then still smiling, at him.

  “Her sister?”

  “Another cake?”

  “Thank you.” I put the book down. “Mr. Conchis—her sister?”

  He smiled. “Yes, of course, her sister.”

  “And—”

  “Yes, yes, and the others. Nicholas—here, Lily is queen. For a month or two we all conform to the needs of her life. Of her happiness.”

  And he had that, very rare in him, gentleness, solicitude, which only Lily seemed able to evoke. I realized that I had stopped smiling; I was beginning to lose my sense of total sureness that he was inventing a new explanation of the masque. So I smiled again.

  “And me?”

  “Do children in England still play that game…” he put his hand over his eyes, at a loss for the word… “cache-cache?”

  “Hide-and-seek? Yes, of course.”

  “Some hide?” He looked at me to guess the rest.

  “And I seek?”

  “The hiders must have a seeker. That is the game. A seeker who is not too cruel. Not too observant.”

  Once again I was made to feel tactless, and to ask myself why. He had provoked this new explanation.

  He went on. “Lily’s real name is Julie Holmes. You must in no circumstance reveal to her that I have told you this.” His eyes bored gravely into me. “Four or five years ago her case attracted a great deal of medical attention. It is one of the best documented in recent psychiatric history.”

  “Could I read about it?”

  “Not now. It would not help her—and it would be merely to satisfy your curiosity. Which can wait.” He went on. “She was in danger of becoming, like many such very unusual cases, a monster in a psychiatric freak show. That is what I am now trying to guard against.”

  “Why exactly are you telling me these things now?”

  “It is a decision I took coming back from Nauplia. Nicholas, I made a foolish miscalculation when I invited you here last weekend.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. You are—quite simply—more intelligent than I realized. A good deal more so. And too much intelligence can spoil our little… amusements here.”

  I had the now-familiar feeling that came in conversations at Bourani; of ambiguity; of not knowing quite what statements applied to—in this case, whether to the assumption that Lily really was a schizophrenic or to the assumption that of course I knew that her “schizophrenia” was simply a new hiding place in the masque.

  “I’m sorry.” He raised his hand, kind man; I was not to excuse myself. I became the dupe again. “This is why you won’t let her go outside Bourani?”

  “Of course.”

  “Couldn’t she go out…” I looked at the tip of my cigarette… “under supervision?”

  “She is, in law, certifiable. And incurable. That is the personal responsibility I have undertaken. To ensure that she never enters an asylum, or a clinic, again.”

  “But you let her wander around. She could easily escape.”

  He raised his head in sharp contradiction. “Never. Her nurse never leaves her.”

  “Her nurse!”

  “He is very discreet. It distresses her to have him always by her, especially here, so he keeps well in the background. One day you will see him.”

  I thought, yeah, with his jackal-head on. It would not wash; but the extraordinary thing was that I knew, and more than half suspected that Conchis knew that I knew, it would not wash. I hadn’t played chess for years; but I remembered that the better you got, the more it became a game of false sacrifices. He was testing not my powers of belief, but my powers of unbelief; assaying my incredulity. I kept my face innocent.

  “This is why you keep her on the yacht?”

  “Yacht?”

  “I thought you kept her on a yacht.”

  “That is her little secret. Allow her to keep it.”

  I smiled. “So this is why my two predecessors came here. And were so quiet about it.”

  “John was an excellent… seeker. But Mitford was a disaster. You see, Nicholas, he was totally tricked by Lily. In one of her persecution phases. As usual I, who devote my life to her, became the persecutor. And Mitford attempted one night—in the crudest and most harmful way—to, as he put it, rescue her. Of course her nurse stepped in. There was a most disagreeable fracas. It upset her deeply. If I sometimes seem irritable to you, it is because I am so anxious not to see any repetition of last year.” He raised his hand. “I mean nothing personal. You are very intelligent, and you are a gentleman; they are both qualities that Mitford was without.”

  I rubbed my nose. I thought of other awkward questions I could ask, and decided not to ask them; to play the dupe. The constant harping on my intelligence made me as suspicious as a crow. There are three types of intelligent person: the first so intelligent that being called very intelligent must seem natural and obvious; the second sufficiently intelligent to see tha
t he is being flattered, not described; the third so little intelligent that he will believe anything. I knew I belonged to the second kind. I could not absolutely disbelieve Conchis; all he said could—just—be true. I supposed there were still poor little rich psychotics kept out of institutions by their doting relations; but Conchis was the least doting person I had ever met. It didn’t wash, it didn’t wash. There were various things about Lily, looks, emotional non sequiturs, those sudden tears, that in retrospect seemed to confirm his story. They proved nothing. Her schizophrenia apart, though, his new explanation of what went on at Bourani made more sense; a group of idle people, talented and bored international rich, and a man like Conchis and a place like Bourani…

  “Well,” he said, “do you believe me?”

  “Do I look as if I don’t?”

  “We are none of us what we look.”

  “You shouldn’t have offered me that suicide pill.”

  “You think all my prussic acid is ratafia?”

  “I didn’t say that. I’m your guest, Mr. Conchis. Naturally I take your word.”

  For a moment, masks seemed to drop on both sides; I was looking at a face totally without humor and he, I suppose, was looking at one without generosity. An at last proclaimed hostility; a clash of wills. We both smiled, and we both knew we smiled to hide a fundamental truth: that we could not trust each other one inch.

  “I wish to say two final things, Nicholas. Whether you believe what I have said is comparatively unimportant. But you must believe one thing. Lily is susceptible and very dangerous—both things without realizing it herself. Like a very fine blade, she can easily be hurt—but she can also hurt. She can hurt you, as I know to my cost, because she can deceive you again and again, if you are foolish enough to let her. We have all had to learn to remain completely detached emotionally from her. Because it is on our emotions that she will prey—if we give her the chance.”

  I remained staring at the edge of the tablecloth.

  “And the second thing?”

  “Now we have had this little talk, please let us agree to continue as if we had not had it. I will behave as if I had not told you the secret. And I want you to do the same.”

  “All right.”

  He stood up and held out his hand, which I shook.

  “Now. Do you feel like some hard work?”

  “No. But lead me to it.”

  He took me to one of the corners of the vegetable garden. Part of the supporting wall had collapsed, and he wanted it built up again, under his supervision. I had to break the dry earth with a pickaxe, shovel it back, lift the heavy stones, arrange them as he directed, packing them with earth, which he watered, his sole contribution apart from giving orders, to bind the wall together again. The wind kept blowing and it was cooler than usual; but I was soon sweating like a pig. I knew the wall must have collapsed sometime back, and I thought it peculiar that a man as rich as Conchis could not afford a few drachmas to hire a man from the village to do it for him. I guessed the real reason: I had to be kept busy, out of the way. All the time since leaving Lily I had listened for the sound of the boat, or a boat. But there had been none. I hadn’t forgotten that I was going to communicate with other worlds that evening; a really complicated episode in the masque was no doubt to be mounted. That was why I was being kept so occupied. And all the time, too, I had Alison’s telegram in my hip-pocket; but the one thing I longed for was to hear from him that I was after all to be his guest over half-term.

  I gave myself a break to have a cigarette. Conchis, in dark-blue jumper and shorts, looked sardonically down at me, hand on hips.

  “Labor is man’s crowning glory.”

  “Not this man’s.”

  “I quote Marx.”

  I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough.

  “I quote blisters.”

  “Never mind. You have earned your passage.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Tonight.” He remained staring down at me, as if I amused him; as clowns amuse philosophers; but also a little as if he felt kinder towards me.

  “Your telegram was opened when it arrived. I read it. This is… ?”

  I nodded curtly. “I shan’t go.”

  “Of course you will go.”

  “I don’t want to meet her any more. It was only loneliness before.”

  He stared down at me. I was sitting against a pine trunk.

  “I shall be away next weekend. We shall all be away. Otherwise I should have been very happy to invite you both.”

  In spite of being warned, I felt a shock of disappointment, which I tried to hide.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “But if all goes well, we shall be here the week after.”

  “In need of a seeker?”

  “In need of a seeker.”

  He contemplated me; reverted tacitly to Alison.

  “A woman is like a keel.”

  “There are keels and keels.”

  “What you told me of her sounded very admirable. Very much what you should have. What you need.”

  I saw that I had been neatly trapped into not asking him why in that case he had set Lily as bait for me. It could always be dismissed as persecution mania.

  “It’s really my business, Mr. Conchis. My decision.”

  “Of course. You are quite right. Please.” He went briskly away to get some more water, and when he came back I had set to again, expending on the job my sullen annoyance at not being invited. Half an hour later the wall was back to something like its proper shape. I carried the tools to a shed beside the cottage and we went back round the front of the house. Conchis said he was going down to check that the boat was securely moored; I would no doubt want to wash.

  “Let me.”

  “Very well. Thank you.”

  I started off, wishing I’d kept my mouth shut, when he said my name. I turned, and he came up to me across the gravel. He gave me a powerful yet oddly paternal look.

  “Go to Athens, Nicholas.” He glanced towards the trees to the east. “Guai a chi la tocca.”

  I had very little Italian, but I knew what he meant.

  He moved away before I could answer; and in an odd way I knew he was saying that she was not for me because she was not for me; not because she was a schizophrenic, or a ghost, or anything else in the masque. It was a sort of ultimate warning-off; but you can’t warn off a man with gambling in his ancestry.

  I went down to the jetty. The boat was already tied very carefully and securely; and he had had ten minutes with Lily, I supposed, to find out exactly what had gone on between us.

  36

  Lily did not appear before dinner, or after dinner; and I became increasingly impatient. Tense would be a better word. I was tense in expectation of a new “episode,” I was tense in expectation of Lily’s taking part in it, and I was tense in expectation of the difficulties Conchis was putting in the way of my meeting her again. I realized that he had so maneuvered me that I could not risk offending him again about the real machinery behind the “visitors” or about Lily.

  The dinner was, for me, uneasily silent. The breeze made the lamp tremble and glow and fade intermittently, and this seemed to increase the general restlessness. Only Conchis seemed calm and at ease.

  After the meal had been cleared he poured me a drink from a small carboy-shaped bottle. It was clear, the color of straw.

  “What’s this?”

  “Raki. From Chios. It is very strong. I want to intoxicate you a little.”

  All through the dinner he had also been pressing me to drink more of the heavy rosé from Antikythera.

  “To make me talk?”

  “To make you receptive.”

  “I read your pamphlet.”

  “And thought it was nonsense.”

  “No. Difficult to verify.”

  “Verification is the only scientific criterion of reality. That does not mean that there may not be realities that are unverifiable.”

  “Did yo
u get any response from your pamphlet?”

  “A great deal. From the wrong people. From the miserable vultures who prey on the human longing for the solution of final mysteries. The spiritualists, the clairvoyants, the cosmopaths, the summerlanders, the blue-islanders, the apportists—all that galêre.” He looked grim. “They responded.”

  “But not other scientists?”

  “No.”

  I sipped the raki; it was like fire. Almost pure alcohol.

  “But you spoke about having proof.”

  “I had proof. But it was not easily communicable. And I later decided that it was better that it was not communicable, except to a few.”

  “Who you elect.”

  “Whom I elect. This is because mystery has energy. It pours energy into whoever seeks the answer to it. If you disclose the solution to the mystery you are simply depriving the other seekers…” he emphasized the special meaning the word now had for me… “of an important source of energy.”

  “No scientific progress?”

  “Of course scientific progress. The solution of the physical problems that face man—that is a matter of technology. But I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solution.”

  I finished the raki. “This is fantastic stuff.”

  He smiled, as if my adjective might be more accurate than I meant; raised the bottle. I nodded.

  “One more glass. Then no more. La dive bouteille is also a poison.”

  “And the experiment begins?”

  “The experience begins. Now I should like you to lie in one of the lounging chairs. Just here.” He pointed behind him. I went and pulled the chair there. “Lie down. There is no hurry. I want you to look at a certain star. Do you know Cygnus? The Swan? That cross-shaped constellation directly above?”

  I realized that he was not going to take the other chaise longue; and suddenly guessed.

  “Is this… hypnosis?”

  “Yes, Nicholas. There is no need to be alarmed.”

  Lily’s warning: Tonight you will understand. I hesitated, then lay back.

  “I’m not. But I don’t think I’m very amenable. Someone tried it at Oxford.”