The Magus

by John Fowles

  ‘Poor little eel.’

  ‘With nowhere to swim.’

  She began to brush and tease her fingers through the water; then whispered again.

  ‘Do you like me to do this?’

  ‘Idiot.’

  She hesitated, then turned, slipped her right arm round my waist, while I put my left one over her shoulder and drew her close against my side. Her left hand felt lower, all round my loins, caressed, lifted and let fall, touched; then silked its way up the shaft, gripped, gently squeezed. The fingers seemed inexperienced, afraid of hurting. I slid my own free hand down and gave hers a little lesson, then left it, and raised her head, found her mouth. I began to lose all sense of everything around us. There was nothing but her tongue, her pressed nakedness, the wet hair, the gentle rhythm of the underwater hand. I would have had it go on all night, this being seduced that was also a seduction, this sudden conversion of the aloof, the fastidious, the voice that quoted Sophocles, into an obedient geisha, an adorable mermaid – though not physiologically the latter. I had shifted my own feet wider to stand more firmly, and one of her legs had curled round mine. The one little garment she wore was pressed very hard against my hip. I slid a hand down from the breast it was holding towards the place; but it was caught, discreetly returned to where it had left.

  All night; but it was too erotic. She seemed to know by instinct that I no longer wanted her gentle; clung tighter still, began to show herself less of a novice; and as I racked quietly beneath the water, she bent her head and bit into the side of my armpit, as if she too had her orgasm, though only in the mind.

  It was done. Her hand left me, then stroked gently up my stomach. I forced her round and kissed her, a little stunned by how complete and quick this descent from prudishness had been. I suspected that I had her sister’s teasing partly to thank for it; but something in Julie herself as well, perhaps always a secret willingness for something like this to happen. We stood clung together, as before, not needing to say anything, the final barrier between us broken. She kissed my skin softly; an unspoken promise.

  ‘I must go. June’s waiting up for me.’

  One last quick kiss, then we swam a few strokes to where the beach shelved to land. Hand in hand to where our clothes lay. We didn’t bother to dry. She stepped into her skirt, twisted to fasten it. I kissed the wet breasts, then hooked her bra for her, helped her back into the singlet; was in turn helped to dress by her. We walked back along beside the water to Bourani, arms enlaced. I had an intuition it had meant more for her … it was a kind of discovery, or rediscovery, of her own latent sexuality, through the satisfaction of mine – and through the night, the warmth, the old magic of wild Greece. Her face seemed softer, simpler, maskless now. I also knew, with an inwardly crowning elation, that it had destroyed whatever last traces had remained of the suspicion Conchis had tried to sow between us. I needed no answers to my letters now. It might on the surface – or under the water – be a trivial little moment of wickedness, but it was a shared one, wanted on both sides; and a little to test that, I suddenly pulled her round as we walked. She turned and raised her mouth as eagerly as if she had been inside my mind and read my thoughts. All was transparent between us.

  I accompanied her back inside the grounds, to within sight of the house. The light in the music-room was off, but I could see one in the back, in the window of the bedroom I used myself. Apparently another bed was brought in, she and June slept there when I was not visiting – and that seemed a perfect symbolic ending to the night, that she was going to sleep in ‘my’ bed. We had one last brief whispered discussion about the following weekend; but all that had receded now. The old man had been as good as his word, we had not been spied on, I was at last sanctioned as the Ferdinand to his salt-haired, clinging, warm-mouthed Miranda. Whatever happened, the summer ahead, all life ahead, was ours.

  She kissed and left me, then after a few steps, turned quickly and ran back and kissed me once more. I waited until I saw her slip under the colonnade and disappear.

  Though I felt tired, I walked the uphill path to the central crest quickly, to dry my damp clothes. I hardly thought about the day to come, the lack of sleep, the dread struggle to stay awake in class; all that was now tolerable. Julie entranced me. It was as if I had stumbled on a sleeping princess and found her, once woken, not merely in love with me, but erotically starved, deliciously eager to exorcize whatever sour and perverse lovemaking had gone on with her ill-starred choice of the previous year. I imagined a Julie who had acquired all Alison’s experience and adeptness, her quick passions, her slow lubricities, but enhanced, enriched, diversified by superior taste, intelligence, poetry … I kept smiling to myself as I walked. There was a thin new moon, the starlight, and I now knew almost by heart my way up through the ghostly, silent forest of Aleppo pines. I saw nothing in the present, only the endless seduction and surrender of that willing body: nights in the village house, indolent naked siestas on some shadowed bed … and when we were satiated, that other, golden, lapping presence, June, implicit two for the price of one. Of course it was Julie I loved, but all love needs a teasing, a testing dry relief.

  I began to review the miracle-mystery that had brought us together – 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 psycho-sexual 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 Heisen-berg principle into his ‘experiment’, so that much of it was indeterminate, both to him as observer-voyeur and to us as observed human particles. I guessed that he partly wanted to taunt us with a false contrast between an all-wise Europe and a callow 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 outperfidy 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 grey velvet of the outstretched pine-tops, 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. Under the silver nailparing of a moon, I felt, though without any melancholy at all, that 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 grey 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.

  There had been Greek army manoeuvres on the mainland a month before, and a coining and going of landing-craft in the strait. These men must be on some similar commando-type exercise. But I didn’t move.

  One of the men turned back, and the others followed. I thought I knew what had happened. They had come along the central ridge and overshot the transverse p
ath that led down to Bourani and Moutsa. As if to confirm my guess there was a distant pop, like a firework. I saw, from somewhere west of Bourani, a shimmering Very light hanging in the sky. It was one of the starshell variety and fell in a slow parabola. I had fired dozens myself, on night exercises. The six were evidently on their way to ‘attack’ some point on the other side of Moutsa.

  For all that, I looked round. Twenty yards away there was a group of rocks with enough small shrubs to give cover. I ran silently under the trees and, forgetting my clean trousers and shirt, dropped down in a natural trough between two of the rocks. They were still warm from the sun. I watched the cleft in the skyline down which the path lay.

  In a few seconds a pale movement told me I was right. The men were coming down. They were probably just a group of friendly lads from the Epirus or somewhere. But I pressed myself as flat as I could. When I could hear that they had come abreast, about thirty yards away, I sneaked a facedown look through the twigs that shielded me.

  My heart jumped. They were in German uniforms. For a moment I thought that perhaps they were dressed up to be the ‘enemy’ on the manoeuvres; but it was unthinkable, after the atrocities of the Occupation, that any Greek soldier would put on a German uniform, even for an exercise; and from then on I knew. The masque had moved outside the domaine, and the old devil had not given in one bit.

  The last man was carrying a much bulkier pack than the others; a pack with a thin, just visible rod rising from it. The truth flashed in on me. In an instant I knew Demetriades had a fellow-spy at the school. He was a very Turkish-looking Greek, a compact, taciturn man with a close-cropped head, one of the science masters. He never came into the common-room; lived in his laboratory. His colleagues nicknamed him ‘o Akhemikos’, the alchemist. With a grim realization of new depths of treachery, I remembered that he was one of Patarescu’s closest cronies. But what I had remembered first was that there was a transmitter in his laboratory, since some of the boys wanted to become radio officers. The school even had a ham radio station sign. I hit the ground with my fist. It had all been so obvious. That was why they always knew I was coming. There was only the one gate; the old gatekeeper was always on duty.

  The men had gone. They must have been wearing rubber-soled boots; and they must have wadded their equipment well to make so little noise. But the fact that I had walked fast had evidently upset their calculations. The flare could only have been a belated signal that I was on my way. For a moment I accused Julie, then exonerated her. Suspicion of her was far too obviously now what Conchis hoped for; but he had not allowed for the way his ‘bait’ would prove she was on the mouse’s side. I knew she must be totally innocent of this new trap; and the mouse was turned fox, not to be tricked so easily.

  I was even half-tempted to follow the men down to see where they went, but I remembered old lessons from my own military training. Never patrol on a windless night if you can avoid it; remember the man nearer the moon sees you better than you see him. Already, within thirty seconds of the passing, I could hardly hear them. A stone was sent scuttering, then silence; then another, very faintly. I gave them another thirty seconds, then I pushed myself up and began to climb the path as fast as I could.

  At the top of the cleft where the ridge flattened out I had to cross fifty yards or so of open space before the ground dipped down to the northern side. It was a windswept area littered with stones, a few lone bushes. On the far side lay a large patch, an acre or so, of high tamarisk. I could see the black opening in the feathery branches where my path went in. I stood and listened. Silence. I began to lope across the open space.

  I had got halfway across when I heard a bang. A second later a Very flare burst open some two hundred yards to the right. It flooded the ridge with light. I dropped, my face averted. The light died down. The moment it hissed into darkness I was on my feet and racing, careless of noise, for the tamarisks. I got into them safely, stopped a moment, trying to work out what insane new trick Conchis was playing. Then I heard footsteps running along the ridge, from the direction the flare had come. I began to sprint down the path between the seven-foot bushes.

  I came to a flat, wider curve in the path, where I could run faster. Then terrifyingly, without any warning, my foot was caught and I was plunging headlong forward. A searing jab as my flung-out hand hit the sharp edge of a stone. An agonizing bang in the ribs. I heard my breath blasted out of my lungs with the impact and my shocked voice saying ‘Oh Christ’. I was too dazed for a moment to realize what had happened. Then came a sharp low command from behind the tamarisks to the right. I spoke only a word or two of the language. But the voice sounded authentically German.

  There were sounds all around me, on both sides of the path. I was surrounded by men dressed as German soldiers. There were seven of them.

  ‘What the bloody hell’s the game?’

  I scrambled on to my knees, rubbing the grit off the palms of my hands. Blood covered the knuckles of one of them. Two men came behind me and seized me by the arms, jerked me up. Another man stood in the centre of the path. He was apparently in charge. He had no rifle or submachine-gun, like the others, but only a revolver. I looked sideways at the rifle the man to my left had slung over Iris shoulder. It looked real; not a stage property. He also looked really German: not Greek.

  The man with the revolver, evidently some kind of N.C.O., spoke again in German. Two men bent, one on either side of the path, and fiddled by the tamarisk stems: a tripwire. The man with the revolver blew a whistle quietly. I looked at the two men beside me.

  ‘You speak English? Sprechen Sie Englisch?’

  They took not the slightest notice, except to jerk my arms for silence. I thought, Christ, wait till I see Conchis again. The N.C.O. stood in the path with his back to me, and the other four men gathered beyond him. Two of them sat down.

  One evidently asked if they could smoke. The N.C.O. gave permission.

  They lit up, helmeted faces in matchflares, and began to talk in a low murmur of voices. They seemed all German. Not just Greeks who knew a few words of German; but Germans. I spoke to the sergeant.

  ‘When you’ve finished the clowning perhaps you’ll tell me what we’re waiting for.’

  The man pivoted round and came up to me. He was a man of about forty-five, long-cheeked. He stood with his face about two feet from mine. He did not look particularly brutal; but he looked his part. I expected another spit routine, but he simply said quietly, ‘Was sagen Sie?’

  ‘Oh go to hell.’

  He remained staring at me, as if he did not understand, but was interested to see me at last; then expressionlessly turned away. The grip of the soldiers relaxed a little. If I had felt less battered, I might have run for it. But then I heard footsteps from the ridge above. A few seconds later the six men I had first seen came marching down the path in a loose single file. But before they came to us, they fell out by the group of smoking men.

  The boy who was holding me on the right was only about twenty. He began siss-whistling under his breath; and in what had been, in spite of my remark about clowning, a pretty convincing performance until then, he struck a rather obvious note, for the tune was the most famous of all, ‘Lili Marlene’. Or was it a very bad pun? He had a huge acne-covered jaw and small eyelashless eyes; specially chosen, I suppose, because he appeared so Teutonic, with a curious machinelike indifference, as if he didn’t know why he was there, who I was; and didn’t care; just carried out orders.

  I calculated: thirteen men, at least half of whom were German. Cost of getting them to Greece, from Athens to the island. Equipment. Training-rehearsing. Cost of getting them off the island, back to Germany. It couldn’t be done under five hundred pounds. And for what? To frighten – or perhaps to impress – one unimportant person. At the same time, now that the first adrenalin panic had subsided, I felt my attitude changed. This scene was so well organized, so elaborate. I fell under the spell of Conchis the magician again. Frightened, but fascinated; and then there w
ere more footsteps.

  Two more men appeared. One was short and slim. He came striding down the path with a taller man behind him. Both had the peaked hats of officers. Eagle badges. The soldiers he passed stood hurriedly, but he made a brisk movement of his hand to put them at ease. He came straight to me. He was obviously an actor who had specialized in German colonel roles; a hard face, a thin mouth; all he lacked were spectacles with oblong lenses and steel frames.

  ‘Hallo.’

  He did not answer, but looked at me rather as the sergeant, who was now standing stiffly some way behind him, had. The other officer was apparently a lieutenant, an aide. I noticed he had a slight limp; an Italian-looking face, very dark eyebrows, round tanned cheeks; handsome.

  ‘Where’s the producer?’

  The ‘colonel’ took a cigarette case out of his inside pocket and selected a cigarette. The ‘lieutenant’ reached forward with a light. Beyond them I saw one of the soldiers cross the path with something in loose paper – food of some sort. They were eating.

  ‘I must say you look the part.’

  He said one word, carefully pursed in his mouth, spat out like a grape pip.