The Magus

by John Fowles

  ‘And you, Nicholas, you had a nice weekend?’

  ‘I met Mr Conchis.’

  ‘You … no, you are joking.’

  ‘You are not to tell the others.’

  He raised his hands in protest. ‘Of course, but how … I can’t believe it.’

  I gave him a very expurgated version of die first visit, the week before, and made Conchis and Bourani as dull as possible.

  ‘He sounds as stupid as I thought. No girls?’

  ‘Not a sign. Not even little boys.’

  ‘Nor even a goat?’

  I threw a box of matches at him. Half by desipience, half by proclivity, he had come to live in a world where the only significant leisure activities were coupling and consuming. His batrachian lips pursed into a smile, and he dug again into the honey.

  ‘He’s asked me over next week again. As a matter of fact, Méli, I wondered, if I do two preps for you … would you do my noon to six on Sunday?’ Sunday duty was easy work. It meant only that one had to stay inside the school and stroll through the grounds a couple of times.

  ‘Well. Yes. I will see.’ He sucked the spoon.

  ‘And tell me what to tell the others, if they ask. I want them to think I’m going somewhere else.’

  He thought a moment, waved the spoon, then said, ‘Tell them you are going to Hydra.’

  Hydra was a stop on the way to Athens, though one didn’t have to catch the Athens boat to go there, as there were often caïques doing the run. It had an embryonic artistic colony of sorts; the kind of place I might plausibly choose to go to. ‘Okay. And you won’t tell anyone?’

  He crossed himself. ‘I am as silent as the … the what is it?’

  ‘Where you ought to be, Méli. The bloody grave.’

  I went to the village several times that week, to see if there were any strange faces about. There was no sign of the three people I was looking for, although there were a few strange faces: three or four wives with young children sent out to grass from Athens, and one or two old couples, dehydrated rentiers, who doddered in and out of the mournful lounges of the Hotel Philadelphia.

  One evening I felt restless and walked down to the harbour. It was about eleven at night and the place, with its catalpas and its old black cannon of 1821, was almost deserted. After a Turkish coffee and a nip of brandy in a kapheneion I started to walk back. Some way past the hotel, still on the few hundred yards of concrete ‘promenade’, I saw a very tall elderly man standing and bending in the middle of the road, apparently looking for something. He looked up as I approached – he was really remarkably tall and strikingly well-dressed for Phraxos; evidently one of the summer visitors. He wore a pale fawn suit, a white gardenia in his buttonhole, an old-fashioned white panama hat with a black band, and he had a small goatee beard. He was holding by its middle a cane with a meerschaum handle, and he looked gravely distressed, as well as naturally grave.

  I asked in Greek if he had lost anything.

  ‘Ah pardon … est-ce que vous parlez français, monsieur?’

  I said, yes, I spoke some French.

  It seemed he had just lost the ferrule of his stick. He had heard it drop off and roll away. I struck a few matches and searched round, and after a little while found the small brass end.

  ‘Ah, très bien. Mille mercis, monsieur.’

  He produced a pocket-book and I thought for a moment he was going to tip me. His face was as gloomy as an El Greco; insufferably bored, decades of boredom, and probably, I decided, insufferably boring. He didn’t tip me, but placed the ferrule carefully inside the wallet, and then politely asked me who I was, and fulsomely, where I had learnt such excellent French. We exchanged a few sentences. He himself was here for only a day or two. He wasn’t French, he said, but Belgian. He found Phraxos ‘pittoresque, mais moins belle que Délos’.

  After a few moments more of this platitudinous chat we bowed and went our ways. He expressed a hope that we might meet again during the remaining two days of his stay and have a longer conversation. But I took very good care that we didn’t.

  At last Saturday came. I had done the two extra duties during the week to clear my Sunday, and was thoroughly exhausted with the school. As soon as the morning lessons were over and I had snatched a quick lunch I headed towards the village with my bag. Yes, I told the old man at the gate – a sure method of propagating the lie – I was off to Hydra for the weekend. As soon as I was out of sight of the school I cut up through the cottages and round the back of the school on to the path to Bourani. But I didn’t go straight there.

  I had speculated endlessly during the week about Conchis, and as futilely as endlessly. I thought I could discern two elements in his ‘game’ – one didactic, the other aesthetic. But whether his cunningly mounted fantasies hid ultimately a wisdom or a lunacy I could not decide. On the whole I suspected the latter. Mania made more sense than reason.

  I had also wondered more and more during the week about the little group of cottages at Agia Varvara, the bay east of Bourani. It was a wide sweep of shingle with a huge row of athanatos, or agaves, whose bizarre twelve-foot candelabra of flowers stood facing the sea. I lay on a thyme-covered slope above the bay, having come quietly through the trees, and watched the cottages below for any sign of unusual life. But a woman in black was the only person I saw. Now I examined it, it seemed an unlikely place for Conchis’s ‘assistants’ to live. It was so open, so easy to watch. After a while I wound my way down to the cottages. A child in a doorway saw me coming through the olives and called, and then the entire population of the tiny hamlet appeared – four women and half a dozen children, unmistakably islanders. With the usual peasant hospitality they offered me a little saucer of quince jam and a thimbleful of raki as well as the glass of cistern water I requested. Their men were all off fishing. I said I was going to see o kyrios Conchis, and their surprise seemed perfectly genuine. Did he ever visit them? Their heads all went back swiftly together, as if the idea was unheard of. I had to listen to the story of the execution again – at least, the oldest woman launched out into a welter of words among which I heard ‘mayor’ and ‘Germans’; and the children raised their arms like guns.

  Maria, then? They saw her, of course? But no, they never saw her. She is not a Phraxiot, one of them said.

  Then the music, the songs in the night? They looked at one another. What songs? I was not too surprised. Very probably they went to bed and woke with the sun.

  ‘And you,’ asked the grandmother, ‘are you a relation of his?’ They evidently thought of him as a foreigner.

  I said I was a friend. He has no friends here, said the old woman, and with a faint hostility in her voice she added, bad men bring bad luck. I said he had guests – a young girl with fair hair, a tall man, a younger girl so high. They had seen them? They had not. Only the grandmother had even been inside Bourani; and that was long before the war. Then they had their way and asked me the usual series of childish but charmingly eager questions about myself, about London, about England.

  I got free in the end, after being presented with a sprig of basil, and walked inland along the bluff until I could climb on to the ridge that led to Bourani. For some time three of the barefoot children accompanied me along the seldom-used path. We topped a crest among the pines, and the distant flat roof of the house came into sight over the sea of trees ahead. The children stopped, as if the house was a sign that they should go no farther. I turned after a while and they were still wistfully standing there. I waved, but they made no gesture in return.

  27

  I went with him and sat in his music-room and listened to him play the D minor English suite. All through tea I had waited for some indication on his part that he knew I had seen the girl – as he must have known, for it was obvious that the nocturnal concert had been given to announce her presence. But I intended to follow the same course of action as I had over the earlier incident: to say nothing until he gave me an opening. Not the slightest chink had appeared in our conversat
ion.

  Conchis seemed to me, no expert, to play as if there was no barrier between him and the music; no need to ‘interpret’, to please an audience, to satisfy some inner vanity. He played as I suppose Bach himself would have played – I think at a rather slower tempo than most modern pianists and harpsichordists, though with no loss of rhythm or shape. I sat in the cool, shuttered room and watched the slightly bowed bald head behind the shining black harpsichord. I heard the driving onwardness of Bach, the endless progressions. It was the first time I had heard him play great music, and I was moved as I had been by the Bonnards; moved in a different way, but still moved. Once again his humanity rose uppermost. It came to me as I listened that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. Conchis had spoken of meeting his future, of feeling his life balanced on a fulcrum, when he first came to Bourani. I was experiencing what he meant; a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice. It was an awareness of a new kind of potentiality, one very different from my old sense of the word, which had been based on the illusions of ambition. The mess of my life, the selfishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice. It was certainly not a moment of new moral resolve, or anything like it. No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be; for all that, it felt like a step forward – and upward.

  He had finished, was watching me.

  ‘You make words seem shabby things.’

  ‘Bach does.’

  ‘And you.’

  He grimaced, but I could see he was not unpleased, though he tried to hide it by marching me off to give his vegetables their evening watering.

  An hour later I was in the little bedroom again. I saw that I had new books by my bedside. There was first a very thin volume in French, a bound pamphlet, anonymous and privately printed, Paris, 1932; it was entitled De la communication intermondiale. I guessed the author easily enough. Then there was a folio: Wild Life in Scandinavia. As with The Beauties of Nature of the week before, the ‘wild life’ turned out to be all female – various Nordic-looking women lying, standing, running, embracing among the fir-forests and fjords. There were lesbian nuances I didn’t much like; perhaps because I was beginning to take against the facet in Conchis’s polyhedral character that obviously enjoyed ‘curious’ objects and literature. Of course I was not – at least I told myself I was not – a puritan. I was too young to know that the having to tell myself gave the game away; and that to be uninhibited about one’s own sexual activities is not the same as being unshockable. I was English; ergo, puritan. I went twice through the pictures; they clashed unpleasantly with the still-echoing Bach.

  Finally there was another book in French – a sumptuously produced limited edition: Le Masque Français au Dix-huitième Siècle. This had a little white marker in. Remembering the anthology on the beach, I turned to the page, where there was a passage bracketed. It read:

  Aux visiteurs qui penetraient dans l’enceinte des murs altiers de Saint-Martin s’offrait la vue délectable des bergers et bergères qui, sur les verts gazons et parmi les bosquets, dansaient et chantaient entourés de leurs blancs troupeaux. lis ne portaient pas toujours les costumes de l’époque. Quelquefois ils étaient vêtus à la romaine ou à la grecque, et ainsi réalisait-on des odes de Théocrite, des bucoliques de Virgile. On parlait meme d’évocations plus scandaleuses, de charmantes nymphes qui les nuits d’été fuyaient au clair de lune, poursuivies par d’étranges silhouettes, moitié homme, moitié chèvre …

  [‘Visitors who went behind the high walls of Saint-Martin had the pleasure of seeing, across the green lawns and among the groves, shepherds and shepherdesses who danced and sang, surrounded by their white flocks. They were not always dressed in eighteenth-century clothes. Sometimes they wore costumes in the Roman and Greek styles; and in this way the odes of Theocritus and the bucolics of Virgil were brought to life. It was even said that there were more scandalous scenes – charming nymphs who on summer nights fled in the moonlight from strange dark shapes, half man, half goat…’]

  At last it began to seem plain. All that happened at Bourani was in the nature of a private masque; and no doubt the passage was a hint to me that I should, both out of politeness and for my own pleasure, not poke my nose behind the scenes. I felt ashamed of the questions I had asked at Agia Varvara.

  I washed and, in deference to the slight formality Conchis apparently liked in the evenings, changed into a white shirt and a summer suit. When I came out of my room to go downstairs the door of his bedroom was open. He called me in.

  ‘We will have our ouzo up here this evening.’

  He was sitting at his desk, reading a letter he had just written. I waited behind him a moment, looking at the Bonnards again while he addressed the envelope. The door of the little room at the end was ajar. I had a glimpse of clothes, of a press. It was simply a dressing-room. By the open doors, Lily’s photograph stared at me from its table.

  We went out on to the terrace. There were two tables there, one with the ouzo and glasses on, the other with the dinner things. I saw at once that there were three chairs at the dinner-table; and Conchis saw me see.

  ‘We shall have a visitor after dinner.’

  ‘From the village?’ But I was smiling, and he was too when he shook his head. It was a magnificent evening, one of those limitless Greek spans of sky and world fluxed in declining light. The mountains were the grey of a Persian cat’s fur, and the sky like a huge unfaceted primrose diamond. I remembered noticing, one similar sunset in the village, how every man outside every taverna had turned to face the west, as if they were in a cinema, with the eloquent all-saying sky their screen.

  ‘I read the passage you marked in Le Masque Français.’

  ‘It is only a metaphor. But it may help.’

  He handed me an ouzo. We raised glasses.

  Coffee was brought and poured, and the lamp moved to the table behind me, so that it shone on Conchis’s face. We were both waiting.

  ‘I hope I shan’t have to forgo the rest of your adventures.’

  He raised his head, in the Greek way, meaning no. He seemed a little tense, and looked past me at the bedroom door; and I was reminded of that first day. I turned, but there was no one there.

  He spoke. ‘You know who it will be?’

  ‘I didn’t know if I was meant to come in last week or not.’

  ‘You are meant to do as you choose.’

  ‘Except ask questions.’

  ‘Except ask questions.’ A thin smile. ‘Did you read my little pamphlet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Read it carefully.’

  ‘Of course. I look forward to it.’

  ‘Then tomorrow night perhaps we can perform an experiment.’

  ‘On communicating with other worlds?’ I didn’t bother to keep scepticism out of my voice.

  ‘Yes. Up there.’ The star-heavy sky. ‘Or across there.’ I saw him look down, making the visual analogy, to the black line of mountains to the west.

  I risked facetiousness. ‘Up there – do they speak Greek or English?’

  He didn’t answer for nearly fifteen seconds; didn’t smile.

  ‘They speak emotions.’

  ‘Not a very precise language.’

  ‘On the contrary. The most precise. If one can learn it.’ He turned to look at me. ‘Precision of the kind you mean is important in science. It is unimportant in –’

  But I never found out what it was unimportant in.

  “We both heard the footsteps, those same light footsteps I had heard before, on the gravel below, coming as if up from the sea. Conchis looked at me quickly.

  ‘You must n
ot ask questions. That is most important.’

  I smiled. ‘As you wish.’

  ‘Treat her as you would treat an amnesiac’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve never met an amnesiac’

  ‘She lives in the present. She does not remember her personal past – she has no past. If you question her about the past, you will only disturb her. She is very sensitive. She would not want to see you again.’

  I wanted to say, I like your masque, I shan’t spoil it. I said, ‘If I don’t understand why, I begin to understand how.’

  He shook his head. ‘You are beginning to understand why. Not how.’

  His eyes lingered on me, burning the sentence in; then looked aside, at the doors. I turned.

  I realized then that the lamp had been put behind me so that it would light her entrance; and it was an entrance to take the breath away.

  She was dressed in what must have been the formal evening style of 1915: an indigo silk evening wrap over a slim ivory-coloured dress of some shot material that once more narrowed and ended just above her ankles. The hobble skirt trammelled her steps, yet charmingly; she swayed a little, seemed to both hesitate and float as she came towards us. Her hair was up, in a sort of Empire fashion. She was smiling and looking at Conchis, though she glanced with a cool interest at me as I stood. Conchis was already on his feet. She looked as stunningly elegant, as poised and assured – because even her slight nervousness seemed professional – as if she had just stepped out of a cabine at Dior. That was indeed my immediate thought: She’s a professional model. And then, The old devil.

  The old devil spoke, after first kissing her hand.

  ‘Lily. May I present Mr Nicholas Urfe. Miss Montgomery.’

  She held out her hand, which I took. A cool hand, no pressure. I had touched a ghost. Our eyes met, but hers gave nothing away. I said, ‘Hallo.’ But she replied only with a slight inclination, and then turned for Conchis to take off her wrap, which he placed over the back of his own chair.