The Magus

by John Robert Fowles

  “South Africa?”

  “My father was a commander in the Navy. He died when we were only six. We’ve always lived in England. I mean he was English.”

  Country of residence: England. Height: 5 ft. 8 in. Colour of eyes: gray. Hair: fair. Special peculiarities: scar on left wrist (twin sister). At the bottom she had signed her name, a neat italic hand. I flicked through the visa pages. Two journeys to Italy, one to France, one to Germany. An entry visa into Greece made out in February; an entry stamp, March 31st, Athens. None for the year before. I thought back to March 31st; that all this had been preparing, even then.

  “They must have been blind. At Cambridge. No one marrying you.” She looked down; we were to keep to the business in hand. “Which college were you at?”

  “Girton.”

  “You must know old Miss Wainwright. Dr. Wainwright.”

  “At Girton?”

  “Chaucer expert. Langland.” She saw my trick; looked down, unamused. “I’m sorry. Of course. You were at Girton.”

  She left a pause. “You don’t know how sick I am of being a figure of mystery. Never using contracted forms.”

  “Mystery becomes you. But come on. A teacher.” She was an unlikely teacher; but then so was I. “Where?”

  She mentioned the name of a famous girls’ grammar school in North London.

  “That’s not very plausible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not enough cachet.”

  “I didn’t want cachet. I wanted to be in London.” A germander light in her eyes, blue and unflinching.

  “I see. And Maurice was one of your pupils.”

  Though she laughed then, it was against her mood. She apparently made up her mind that questions were not helping; that what she had to say was too serious for any more banter.

  “We, June and I, were in a London amateur company called the Tavistock Rep. They have a little theatre in Canonbury.”

  “Yes. I went there once. Seriously.”

  “Well, last summer they put on Lysistrata.” She looked at me as if I might have heard about it. “There’s a rather clever producer there called Tony Hill, and he put us both into the main part. I stood in front of the stage and spoke the lines and June did all the acting. In mime. You didn’t read about this? It was in some of the papers… quite a lot of real theatre people came to see it. The production. Not us.”

  “When was this?”

  “Almost exactly this time last year.” We remained leaning close together. She began putting the books and letters back. “One day a man came backstage, told us, June and me, he was a theatrical agent and he had someone who wanted to meet us. A film producer.” She smiled impatiently at me. “Of course. And he was so secretive about who it was that it seemed too clumsy and obvious for words. But two days later we both got a formal invitation to have lunch at Claridge’s from someone who signed himself…”

  “Maurice Conchis.”

  “We hesitated, then—just for fun, really—went along.” She paused. “And Maurice… dazzled us. Lunch alone with him in his private suite. We were expecting one of those dreadful pseudo-Hollywood types who starts feeling you after the first ten minutes. Instead there was this charming, impeccably correct man. Then after lunch, when we were duly enchanted, he got down to business.”

  “Didn’t he tell you anything about himself?”

  She tossed her hair back. Serious and practical. I began to believe she might be a schoolmistress.

  “Oh yes. But all rather vague. A kind of lonely rich man, with houses in France and Greece. A bit of a scholar. We got that impression. And a lot about Bourani. He described everything here. Exactly as it is… as a place. And he told us about this film company he owned in Beirut.” She silenced me. “And then—it was so amazing—he suddenly sprang this offer on us. To star in a film he was going to make this summer.”

  “What film?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. At first we were terribly suspicious again. The Lebanon. But then he said the salary.” She sat up, turned her still amazed face to me. “Five thousand between us—plus a hundred pounds a month each for expenses.”

  “But you must still have smelt a rat?”

  “Of course we did.” She smiled. “You were funny that day… ‘a rat five feet eight inches long’…” she looked shyly at me, picked at the nap of the rug, went on. “Well, we were driven home—in a Rolls-Royce—to think it over. You know, to a top flat in Belsize Park. Like Cinderellas. That’s where he was so clever, he put so little direct pressure on us. Never the shadow of the shadow of a false move on his part. We saw him several times more. He took us out. Theatre. Opera. Never an attempt to get either of us on our own. And… well, I don’t know what you really feel about him, but he is rather a marvelous old man. And even though he frightens us now, I still… anyway.”

  “What did everybody think? I mean, your friends—this producer man?”

  “They thought we ought to make inquiries. So we went to an agent and he found this film company does exist. It makes films mainly for the Arab market. Egypt.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Polymus Films.” She spelt it. “It’s in whatever they list film companies in—the trade directory. Perfectly respectable.”

  “And you said yes.”

  “And in the end we said yes.” She looked tentatively at me, as if she did not expect me to believe her; such gullibility. “We had got to know him better by then. So we thought.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Oh Maurice saw to that. He insisted on having her up to London and bowled her over with his gentlemanliness.” She added ruefully, “And his money.”

  “This film?”

  “The story was taken from a demotic Greek novel that’s never been translated. By a writer called Theodorakis—have you ever heard of him? Three Hearts?” I shook my head. “It was written in the nineteen twenties. It’s about two English girls, they’re supposed to be the ambassador’s daughters, who go for a holiday on a Greek island during the First World War and meet a Greek poet there—a dying genius—and they both fall in love with him and he falls in love with them and at the end everyone’s terribly miserable and they all renounce each other… exactly.” She answered my grimace. “But actually when Maurice told it it had a sort of Dame aux Camélias charm.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “Bits of it.”

  I spoke in Greek. “Xerete kale ta nea ellenika?”

  She answered, in a more fluent and much better-accented demotic than my own, “If one knows ancient Greek it is a help, but the two languages are very different.” She gave me a steady look, and I touched my forehead.

  “In London he showed us a long typewritten synopsis. And told us the script was being written in Athens. Our agent thought it was all perfectly normal.” She tore a loose thread from the side of her skirt. “Only we even suspect him now. We think Maurice may have bribed him. To make us less suspicious.”

  “An agent would hardly—”

  “Wouldn’t he? Do you know the slang word for them? Flesh peddlers.”

  “Maurice did pay you?”

  “As soon as we signed the contracts.”

  She delved in the bag, then swiveled round so that we were sitting facing in opposite directions. She came out with a wallet; produced two cuttings from it. One showed the two sisters standing in a London street, in overcoats and woolen hats, laughing. I knew the paper by the print but it was in any case gummed on to a gray cuttings agency tag: Evening Standard, January 8, 1953. The paragraph underneath ran:

  AND BRAINS AS WELL!

  Two lucky twins, June and Julie (on right) Holmes, who will star in a film this summer to be shot in Greece. The twins both have Cambridge degrees, acted a lot at varsity, speak eight languages between them. Unfair note for bachelors: neither wants to marry yet.

  * * *

  “We didn’t write the caption.”

  “So I guessed.”

  The other cutt
ing 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 with two 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. “And 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.”

  “It was a nice act.”

  “That first conversation with you. I had terrible trac. Far worse than I’ve ever had on a real stage.”

  “But you forced yourself to kiss me.”

  “Only because I thought I had to.” I followed the hollow of her arched back. She had raised one foot backwards in the air, and the skirt had fallen. The blue silk stocking finished just below the knee; a little piece of bare flesh.

  “And yesterday?”


  “It was in the script.” Her hair clouded her face.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  She shook her hair back, gave me a quick look, less shy than I had hoped. “This other thing’s so much more important. And I’m trying to explain.”

  “Subject postponed.”

  “First of all he must have known that sooner or later you and I would break down the barrier of pretenses—I mean you said it that first night, we are both English, the same sort of background. It was inevitable.”

  She stopped, as if she did not want to bring up the next point.

  “Go on. And?”

  “He warned me last week that I mustn’t get emotionally involved with you in any way.” She stared at the ground in front of her. A blue butterfly hovered over us, moved on.

  “Did he give a reason?”

  “He said that one day soon I should have to make you hate me. Because you are to fall in love with June. It’s this ridiculous story again.”

  “So?”

  She turned and sat up and pulled the ends of her hair together under her chin. It made her look Scandinavian, a swan maiden.

  “He’s also taken to denigrating you in front of us. Says, oh—you’re too English. Unimaginative. Selfish. Perhaps he’s really accusing us. Anyway, the first time I argued. But now I know he’s deliberately doing it to drive me the other way. Driving us together.” She released her hair, but remained staring thoughtfully out to sea. “He hasn’t got us here to mystify us. But for some other reason. And we think he’s a voyeur. Not an ordinary voyeur, but still a voyeur.” She looked at me. “That’s it.”

  Our looks became tangled in supposition: in double and treble deception.

  “We seem to have all the same ideas.”

  “Because he means us to.”

  I stood up, hands on hips. “But it’s fantastic. I mean… what?”

  “He’s got a ciné-camera. With a telephoto lens. He says it’s for birds.” I gave her another squinny, and she shrugged. “It would explain why he never… touches us, or anything.”