The Magus - John Fowles [52]
37
Someone had knocked on the door. I was staring at a wall. I was in bed, I was wearing pyjamas, my clothes were folded on the chair. It was daylight, very early, the first thin sunlight on the tops of the pines outside. I looked at my watch. Just before six o'clock. I sat on the edge of the bed. I had a black plunge of shame, of humiliation; of having been naked in front of Conchis, of having been in his power; even worse, others could have seen. Lily. I saw myself lying there and all of them sitting and grinning while Conchis asked me questions and I gave naked answers. But Lily--he must also hypnotise her; this was why she could not lie. Svengali and Trilby. Then the mystical experience itself, still so vivid, as clear as a learnt lesson, as the details of a drive in new country, hit me. I saw how it had been done. There would have been some drug, some hallucinogen in the _raki_. He had suggested these things, these stages of knowledge, he had induced them as I lay there. The richness of what I remembered; the potential embarrassment of what I could not; the good of it and the evil of it; these two things made me sit for minutes with my head in my hands, torn between resentment and gratitude. I went and washed, stared at myself in the mirror, went down to the coffee the silent Maria had waiting for me. I knew Conchis would not appear, Maria would say nothing. Nothing was to be explained, everything was planned to keep me in suspense until I came again. As I walked back through the trees, I tried to assess the experience; why, though it was so beautiful, so intensely real, it seemed also so sinister. It was difficult in that early morning light and landscape to believe that anything on earth was sinister, yet the feeling persisted with me and it was not only one of humiliation. It was one of new danger, of meddling in darker, stranger things than needed to be meddled with. It also made Lily's emotional fear of Conchis much more convincing than his pseudo-medical pity for her; she might just be schizophrenic, but he was proven a hypnotist. But this was to assume that they were not working together to trick me; and then I began clawing, in a panic of memory, through all my meetings with Conchis, trying to see if he could ever have hypnotised me before, without my being aware of it. I remembered bitterly that only the afternoon before I had said to Lily that my sense of reality was like gravity. For a while I was like a man in space, whirling through madness. I remembered Conchis's trancelike state during the Apollo scene. Had he hypnotised me into imagining it all? Had he willed me to go to sleep when I did that afternoon, so conveniently placed for the Foulkes apparition? Had there ever been a man and a girl standing there? Lily even... but I recalled the feel of her skin, of those ungiving lips. I got back to earth. But I was badly shaken. It was not only the being hypnotised by Conchis that unanchored me; in a subtler but similar way I knew I had been equally hypnotised by Lily. I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive. It wasn't only that I foresaw a very steep bill with Lily; she shook my whole theory. She had a certain exhalation of surrender about her, as if she was a door waiting to be pushed open; but it was the darkness beyond that held me. Perhaps it was partly a nostalgia for that extinct Lawrentian woman of the past, the woman inferior to man in everything but that one great power of female dark mystery and beauty: the brilliant, virile male and the dark, swooning female. The essences of the two sexes had become so confused in my androgynous twentieth-century mind that this reversion to a situation where a woman was a woman and I was obliged to be fully a man had all the fascination of an old house after a cramped, anonymous modern flat. I had been enchanted into wanting sex often enough before; but never into wanting love. All that morning I sat in classes, teaching as if I was still hypnotised, in a dream of hypotheses. Now I saw Conchis as a sort of novelist sans novel, creating with people, not words; now I saw him as a complicated but still very dirty old man; now as a Svengali; now as a genius among practical jokers. But whichever way I saw him I was fascinated, and Lily, Lily with her hair blown sideways, Lily with her tearstained face, Lily at that first moment, in the lamplight, cool ivory... I didn't try to pretend that I was anything else than almost literally bewitched by Bourani. It was almost a force, like a magnet, drawing me out of the classroom windows, through the blue air to the central ridge, and down there where I so wanted to be. The rows of olive-skinned faces, bent black heads, the smell of chalk dust, an old inkstain that rorschached my desk--they were like things in a mist, real yet unreal; obstacles in limbo. I was glad, with a simplicity that recalled earliest adolescence, first pash on a girl, that I had the white thread. I put it in an envelope, and I must have looked at it a dozen times that day, between classes, even during classes, as if it was a mascot, a proof, a good omen. After lunch Demetriades came into my room and wanted to know who Alison was; and began being obscene, dreadful stock Greek _facetiae_ about tomatoes and cucumbers, when I refused to tell him anything. I shouted at him to fuck off; had to push him out by force. He was offended and spent the rest of that week avoiding me. I didn't mind. It kept him out of my way. After my last lesson I couldn't resist it. I had to go back to Bourani. I didn't know what I was going to say, but I had to reenter the domaine. As soon as I saw it, the hive of secrets lying in the last sunshine over the seething pinetops, far below, I was profoundly relieved, as if it might not have been still there; and I was a little more cautious and practical, less inclined to walk in without being invited. The closer I got, the more nefarious I felt, and the more nefarious I became. I began to realise that I didn't want to be seen; I simply wanted to see them; to know they were there, waiting for me. I approached at dusk from the east, slipped under the wire, and walked down cautiously past the statue of Poseidon, over the gulley, and through the trees to where I could see the house. Every window at the side was shuttered up. There was no smoke from Maria's cottage. I worked round to where I could see the front of the house. The French windows under the colonnade were shuttered. So were the ones that led from Conchis's bedroom onto the terrace. It was clear that no one was there. I walked back through the darkness, feeling depressed, and increasingly resentful that Conchis could spirit his world away like that, deprive me of it, like a callous drugward doctor with some hooked addict. The next day I wrote a letter to Mitford, telling him that I'd been to Bourani, met Conchis, and begging him to come clean on his own experience there. I sent it to the address in Northumberland. I also saw Karazoglou again, and tried to coax more information out of him about Leverrier. He was obviously quite sure that Levertier had never met Conchis. He remembered one new thing: that Leverrier had been a Catholic; he had used to go to mass in Athens. And he said more or less the same as Conchis. _Il avait toujours rair un peu triste, il ne s'est jamais habitu