The Magus - John Fowles [23]
17
When I went downstairs, the music room was lamplit but empty. There was a tray on the table in front of the stove with a bottle of _ouzo_, a jug of water, glasses and a bowl of fat blue-black Amphissa olives. I poured out some _ouzo_ and added enough water to make it go milkily opaque. Then, glass in hand, I began a tour of the bookshelves. The books were methodically arranged. There were two entire sections of medical works, mostly in French, and many--they hardly seemed to go with spiritualism--on psychiatry, and another two of scientific books of all kinds; several shelves of philosophical works, and also a fair number of botanical and ornithological books, mostly in English and German; but the great majority of all the rest were autobiographies and biographies. There must have been thousands of them. They appeared to have been collected without any method: Wordsworth, Mae West, Saint-Simon, geniuses, criminals, saints, nonentities. The collection had the eclectic impersonality of a public library. Behind the harpsichord and under the window there was a low glass cabinet which contained two or three classical pieces. There was a rhyton in the form of a human head, a black-figure kylix on one side, a small red-figure amphora on the other. On top of the cabinet were also three objects: a photo, an eighteenth-century clock and a white-enamelled snuffbox. I went behind the music stool to look at the Greek pottery. The painting on the flat inner bowl of the kylix gave me a shock. It involved two satyrs and a woman and was very obscene indeed. Nor were the paintings on the amphora of a kind any museum would dare put on display. Then I looked closer at the clock. It was mounted in ormolu with an enamelled face. In the middle was a rosy little naked cupid; the shaft of the one short hand came through his loins, and the rounded tip at its end made it very clear what it was meant to be. There were no hours marked round the dial, and the whole of the right-hand half was blacked out, with the word _Sleep_ in white upon it. On the other half, enamelled in white, were written in neat black script the following faded but still legible words: at six, _Exhaustion_; at eight, _Enchantment_; at ten, _Erection_; at twelve, _Ecstasy_. The cupid smiled; the clock was not going and his manhood hung permanently askew at eight. I opened the innocent white snuffbox. Beneath the lid was enacted, in Boucheresque eighteenth-century terms, exactly the same scene as some ancient Greek had painted in the kylix two thousand years before. It was between these two _objets_ that Conchis had chosen, whether with perversion, with humour, or with simple bad taste, I couldn't decide, to place another photo of the Edwardian girl, his dead fianc� She looked out of the oval silver frame with alert, smiling eyes. Her splendidly white skin and fine neck were shown off by a square d�lletage, messy swathes of lace tied over her bosom by what seemed a white shoelace. By one armpit was a floppy black bow. She looked very young, as if she was wearing her first evening dress; and in this photo she looked less heavy featured; rather piquant, a touch of mischief, almost as if she rather enjoyed being queen of a cabinet of curiosa. A door closed upstairs, and I turned away. The eyes of the Modigliani seemed to glare at me severely, so I sneaked out under the colonnade, where a minute later Conchis joined me. He had changed into a pair of pale trousers and a dark cotton coat. He stood silhouetted in the soft light that flowed out of the room and silently toasted me. The mountains were just visible, dusky and black, like waves of charcoal, the sky beyond still not quite drained of afterglow. But overhead--I was standing on the steps down to the gravel--the stars were out. They sparkled less fierily than they do in England; tranquilly, as if they were immersed in limpid oil. "Thank you for the bedside books." "If you see anything more interesting on the shelves, take it up. Please." There was a strange call from the dark trees to the east of the house. I had heard it in the evenings at the school, and at first thought it made by some moronic village boy. It was very high pitched, repeated at regular intervals. _Kew_. _Kew_. _Kew_. Like a melancholy transmigrated bus conductor. "There is my friend," said Conchis. For an absurd and alarming moment I thought he must mean the woman of the glove. I saw her flitting through the island trees in her Ascot gloves, forever searching for Kew. The call came again, eery and stupid, from the night behind us. Conchis counted five slowly, and the call came as he raised his hand. Then five again, and again it came. "What is it?" "_Otus scops_. The scops owl. It is very small. Not twenty centimetres. Like this." "I saw you had some books on birds." "Ornithology interests me." "And you have studied medicine." "I studied medicine. Many years ago." "And never practised?" "Only on myself." Far out to sea to the west I saw the bright lights of the Athens boat. On Saturday nights it went on south down to Kythera. But instead of relating Bourani to the ordinary world, the distant ship seemed only to emphasise its hiddenness, its secrecy. I took the plunge. "What did you mean by saying that you were psychic?" "What did you think I meant?" "Spiritualism?" "Infantilism." "That's what I think." "Of course." I could just make out his face in the light from the doorway. He could see more of mine, because I had swung round and sat against a column. "You haven't really answered my question." "Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness. You are like a porcupine. When that animal has its spines erect, it cannot eat. If you do not eat, you will starve. And your prickles will die with the rest of your body." I swilled the last of the ouzo round in my glass. "Isn't it your century too?" "I have lived a great deal in other centuries." "In literature." "In reality." The owl called again, at monotonously regular intervals. I stared out into the darkness of the pines. "Reincarnation?" "Is rubbish." "Then..." I shrugged. "I cannot escape my human life span. So there is only one way I could have lived in other centuries." I was silent. "I give up." "Not give up. Look up. What do you see?" "Stars. Space." "And what else? That you know are there. Though they are not visible." "Other worlds?" I turned to look at him. He sat, a black shadow. I felt a chill run down my spine. Not at the supernatural, but at the now proven realisation that I was with a madman. He took the thought out of my mind. "I am mad?" "Mistaken." "No. Neither mad nor mistaken." "You... travel to other worlds?" "Yes. I travel to other worlds." I put the glass down and pulled out a cigarette; lit it before speaking. "In the flesh?" "If you can tell me where the flesh ends and the mind begins, I will answer that." "You um... you have some evidence of this?" "Ample evidence." He allowed a moment to pass. "For those with the intelligence to see it." "This is what you meant by election and being psychic?" "In part." I was silent. I was thinking that I must make up my mind what course of action to take. I sensed a sort of inherent hostility to him in myself, which rose from beyond anything that had passed between us; a subconscious resistance of water against oil. I decided to pursue a course of polite scepticism. "You do this... travelling by, I don't know, something like telepathy?" But before he could answer there was a soft slap of footsteps round the colonnade. Maria stood and bobbed. "_Sas efcharistoume_, Maria. Dinner is served," said Conchis. We stood and went in to the music room. As we put our glasses on the tray he said, "There are things that words cannot explain." I looked down. "At Oxford we are taught to assume that if words can't explain, nothing else is likely to." "Very well." He smiled. "May I call you Nicholas now?" "Of course. Please." He poured a drop of ouzo into our glasses. We raised and clinked them. "_Eis 'ygeia sas, Nicholas_." "_Sygeia_." But I had a strong suspicion even then that he was drinking to something other than my health. The table in the corner of the terrace glittered, an unexpectedly opulent island of glass and silver in the darkness. It was lit by one tall lamp with a dark shade; the light flowed downwards, concentrated on the white cloth, and was then reflected up, lighting our faces strangely, Caravaggio fashion, against the surrounding darkness. The meal was excellent. We ate small fish cooked in wine, a delicious chicken, herb-flavoured cheese and a honey-and-curd flan made, according to Conchis, from a mediaeval Turkish recipe. The wine we drank had a trace of resin, as if the vineyard had merely been beside a pine forest, and was nothing like the harsh turpentine-tasting rotgut I sometimes drank in the village. We ate largely in silence. He evidently preferred this. If we talked, it was of the food. He ate slowly, and very little, but I left Maria nothing to take away. When we had finished, Maria brought Turkish coffee in a brass pot and took the lamp, which was beginning to attract too many insects. She replaced it by a single candle. The flame rose untrembling in the still air; now and again a persistent insect would fly around, in, around and away. I lit my cigarette, and sat like Conchis, half-turned towards the sea and the south. He did not want to talk, and I was content to wait. Suddenly there were footsteps below on the gravel. They were going away from the house towards the sea. At first I took them for Maria's, though it seemed strange that she should be going down to the beach at that time. But a second later I knew that they could not, or could no more plausibly than the glove, be hers. They were light, rapid, quiet steps, as if the person was trying to make as little noise as possible. They might even have belonged to a child. I was sitting away from the parapet, and could see nothing below. I glanced at Conchis. He was staring out into the darkness as if the sound was perfectly normal. I shifted unobtrusively, to crane a look over the parapet. But the steps had passed away into silence. With alarming speed a large moth dashed at the candle, repeatedly and frantically, as if attached to it by elastic cord. Conchis leant forward and snuffed the flame. "You do not mind sitting in darkness?" "Not at all." It occurred to me that it might after all have really been a child, from one of the cottages at the bay to the east; someone who had come to help Maria. I was just about to ask when Conchis spoke. "I should tell you how I came here." "It must have been a marvellous site to find." "Of course. But I am not talking of architecture." He sat staring out to sea, his face like a death mask, emotionless. "I came to Phraxos looking for a house to rent. A house for a summer. I did not like the village. I do not like coasts that face north. On my last day I had a boatman take me round the island. For pleasure. By chance he landed me for a swim at Moutsa down there. By chance he said there was an old cottage up here. By chance I came up. The cottage was crumbled walls. A litter of stones choked with thorn-ivy. It was very hot. About four o'clock on the afternoon of April the eighteenth, 1929." He paused, as if the memory of that year had stopped him; and to prepare me for a new facet of himself; a new shift. "There were many more trees then. One could not see the sea. I stood in the little clearing round the ruined walls. I had immediately the sensation that I was expected. Something had been waiting there all my life. I stood there, and I knew who waited, who expected. It was myself. I was here and this house was here, you and I and this evening were here, and they had always been here, like reflections of my own coming. It was like a dream. I had been walking towards a closed door, and by a sudden magic its impenetrable wood became glass, through which I saw myself coming from the other direction, the future. I speak in analogies. You understand?" I nodded, cautious, not concerned with understanding; because underlying everything he did I had come to detect an air of stage management, of the planned and rehearsed. He did not tell me of his coming to Bourani as a man tells something that chances to occur to him, but far more as a dramatist tells an anecdote where the play requires. He went on. "I knew at once that I must live here. I could not go beyond. It was only here that my past would merge into my future. So I stayed. I am here tonight. And you are here tonight." In the darkness he was looking sideways at me. I said nothing for a moment; there had seemed to be some special emphasis on the last sentence. "Is this also what you meant by being psychic?" "It is what I mean by being fortunate. There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being." "Perhaps." "Not perhaps. For certain." "What happens if one doesn't recognise the... point of fulcrum?" But I was thinking, I have had it already--the silence in the trees, the siren of the Athens boat, the black mouth of the shotgun barrels. "You will be like the many. Only the few recognise this moment. And act on it." "The elect?" "The elect. The chosen by hazard." I heard his chair creak. "Look over there. The lamp fishermen." Away at the far feet of the mountains there was a thin dust of ruby lights in the deepest shadows. I didn't know whether he meant simply, look; or that the lamps were in some way symbolic of the elect. "You're very tantalising sometimes, Mr. Conchis." "I am prepared to be less so." "I wish you would be." He was silent again. "Suppose that what I might tell you should mean more to your life than the mere listening?" "I hope it would." Another pause. "I do not want politeness. Politeness always conceals a refusal to face other kinds of reality. I am going to say something about you that may shock you. I know something about you that you do not know yourself." He paused, again as if to let me prepare myself. "You too are psychic, Nicholas. You are sure you are not. I know that." "Well, I'm not. Really." I waited, then said, "But I'd certainly like to know what makes you think I am." "I have been shown." "When?" "I prefer not to say." "But you must. I don't even know what you really mean by the word. If you merely mean some sort of intuitive intelligence, then I hope I am psychic. But I thought you meant something else." Again silence, as if he wanted me to hear the sharpness in my own voice. "You are treating this as if I have accused you of some crime. Of some weakness." "I'm sorry. Look, Mr. Conchis, I just know that I am _not_ psychic. I've never had a psychical experience in my life." I added, na