The Magus - John Fowles [66]
46
I woke feeling even more slugged, more beaten-steak--the heat does it in Greece--than usual. It was ten o'clock. I soaked my head in cold water, dragged on my clothes, and went downstairs. There was a note waiting for me on top of the muslin-mounded breakfast table under the colonnade. _DEAR NICHOLAS,_ _Alas, very urgent financial business connected with the "scare" of a fortnight ago obliges me to go at once to Geneva. I look forward to seeing you next Saturday, if you can dispose of your academic duties. Maria is leaving with me. She is taking advantage of my absence to visit relatives in Santorini. Hermes is returning to lock up the house this afternoon. Please enjoy your lunch, and accept my apologies for this unpardonable breach of hospitality._ _MAURICE CONCHIS_ I looked under the muslin. There was my breakfast. The spirit stove to heat up the coffee. A carafe of water, another of _retsina_; and under a second muslin an ample cold lunch. My first thought was that he had funked meeting me after the incident with his Negro thug; my second, that at least I could make some detective use of the occasion. I carried the breakfast things round to Maria's cottage, as if to put them out of harm's way on her table, but the door was locked. First failure. I went upstairs, knocked on Conchis's door, then tried it. It was also locked. Second failure. Then I went round all the groundfloor rooms in the house, and pulled up all the carpets to see if there were trapdoors to mysterious cellars. There were not. Ten minutes later I gave up; I knew I was not going to find any clue to the girls' true identity, and that was all that interested me. I went down to the private beach--the boat was gone--and swam out of the little cove and round its eastern headland. There some of the tallest cliffs on the island, a hundred feet or more high, fell into the sea among a litter of boulders and broken rocks. The cliffs curved in a very flat concave arc half a mile eastwards, not really making a bay, but jutting out from the coast just enough to hide the beach where the three cottages were. I examined every yard of the cliffs. No way down, no place where even a small boat could land. Yet this was the area Lily and Rose supposedly headed for when they went "home." There was dense low scrub on the abrupt-sloping clifftops before the pines started, just enough to hide in, but manifestly impossible to live in. That left only one solution. They made their way along the top of the cliffs, then circled inland and down past the cottages. A vein of colder water made me twist on my front again, and as I turned I saw. A girl in a pale pink dress was standing under the seawardest pines on top of the cliff, some hundred yards to the east of where I was; in shadow, but brilliantly, exuberantly conspicuous. She waved down and I waved back. She walked a few yards along the edge of the trees, the sunlight between the pines dappling the pink dress, and then, with an inner leap of exultation, I saw another flash of pink, a second girl. They stood, each replica of each, some twenty yards apart, and the closer waved again. Then both disappeared back together into the trees. Five minutes later I arrived, very out of breath, at the deserted Poseidon statue. I suffered a moment's angry suspicion that I was being teased again--shown them only to lose them. But I went down the far side of the ravine, past the carob; and soon I could see their two pink figures. They were sitting on a shaded hummock of rock and earth, wearing identical summer dresses, loose-topped and longskirted, of some cottony material with thin pink and white, rose and lily, stripes. A glimpse of pale blue stockings. Rose stood as soon as she saw me coming and came idly and Edwardianly down the hummock and a little way towards me. She had her hair up, two curved wings that framed her face and ended in a chignon. I glanced at her wrist, though I was sure. It had no scar. And I glanced beyond her at the girl whose hair was down her back, as loose as on the Sunday morning a fortnight before; who looked so much younger, yet sat and unsmilingly watched us meet. Rose made a face; a modern face that denied her costume. "_Elle est fdch