The Magus - John Fowles [16]
13
Before anything else, I knew I was expected. He saw me without surprise, with a small smile, almost a grimace, on his face. He was nearly completely bald, brown as old leather, short and spare, a man whose age was impossible to tell; perhaps sixty, perhaps seventy; dressed in a navy-blue shirt, knee-length shorts, and a pair of salt-stained gymshoes. The most striking thing about him was the intensity of his eyes; very dark brown, staring, with a simian penetration emphasised by the remarkably clear whites; eyes that seemed not quite human. He raised his left hand briefly in a kind of silent salutation, then strode to the corner of the colonnade, leaving me with my formed words unspoken, and called back to the cottage. "Maria!" I heard a faint wail of answer. "You..." I began, as he turned. But he raised his left hand again, this time to silence me; took my arm and led me to the edge of the colonnade. He had an authority, an abrupt decisiveness, that caught me off-balance. He surveyed the landscape, then me. The sweet saffronlike smell of some flowers that grew below, at the edge of the gravel, wafted up into the shade. "I chose well?" His English sounded perfect. "Wonderfully. But you must let me--" Once again his arm, brown and corded, swept silencingly towards the sea and the mountains and the south, as if I might not have properly appreciated it. I looked sideways at him. He was obviously a man who rarely smiled. There was something masklike, emotionpurged, about his face. Deep furrows ran from beside his nose to the corners of his mouth; they suggested experience, command, impatience with fools. He was slightly mad, no doubt harmlessly so, but mad. I had an idea that he thought I was someone else. He kept his apelike eyes on me. The silence and the stare were alarming, and faintly comic, as if he was trying to hypnotise a bird. Suddenly he gave a curious little rapid shake of the head; quizzical, rhetorical, not expecting an answer. Then he changed, as if what had happened between us till then was a joke, a charade, that had been rehearsed and gone according to plan, but could now be ended. And I was completely off-balance again. He wasn't mad after all. He even smiled, and the ape eyes became almost squirrel eyes. He turned back to the table. "Let us have tea." "I only came for a glass of water. This is.. "You came here to meet me. Please. Life is short." I sat down. The second place was mine. An old woman appeared, in black, a black grey with age, her face as lined as an Indian squaw's. She was incongruously carrying a tray with an elegant silver teapot, a kettle, a bowl of sugar, a saucer with sliced lemon. "This is my housekeeper. Maria." He spoke to her in very precise Greek, and I heard my own name and the name of the school. The old woman bobbed at me, her eyes on the ground, unsmiling, and then unloaded her tray. Conchis plucked the muslin away from one of the plates with the quick aplomb of a conjurer. I saw cucumber sandwiches. He poured the tea, and indicated the lemon. "How do you know who I am, Mr. Conchis?" "Anglicise my name. I prefer the _ch_ soft." He sipped his tea. "If you interrogate Hermes, Zeus will know." "I'm afraid my colleague was tactless." "You no doubt found out all about me." "I found out very little. But that makes this even kinder of you." He looked out to sea. "There is a poem of the Tang dynasty." He sounded the precious little glottal stop. "Here at the frontier, there are falling leaves. Although my neighbours are all barbarians, and you, you are a thousand miles away, there are always two cups on my table." I smiled. "Always?" "I saw you last Sunday." "They were your things down there?" He bowed his head. "And I also saw you this afternoon." "I hope I haven't kept you from your beach." "Not at all. My private beach is down there." He pointed over the gravel. "But I always like a beach to myself. And I presume the same of you. Now. Eat the sandwiches." He poured me more tea. It had huge torn leaves and a tarry China fragrance. On the other plate were _kourabi