The Magus - John Fowles [73]
49
I came up to the gate, waited a few moments to listen, heard nothing, and went off the track through the trees to where I could see the house. It lay in silence, black against the last lavender light from the west; there was one light on, in the music room. The scops owl called from somewhere nearby. As I returned to the gate a small black shape slipped overhead and dipped towards the sea between the trees. Conchis, perhaps; the wizard as owl. I came out onto the edge of the beach at Moutsa; the beach dark, the water dim, the very faintest night lap. She stood, pale ghost, from the chapel wall as soon as I appeared through the trees; a pale ivory skirt with a green hem, a white blouse under a loose long Virginia Woolf-like cardigan garment of the same--almost, in that light, black--dark green. She held up her wrist with the sleeve pushed back. But I hardly glanced at the scar and we took each other's hands. A moment, suddenly shy. Then she came into my arms, and we kissed; she turned her head away almost at once but let me hold her close. It was strange; physical privileges so small that I had taken them with so many other girls for granted--granted to the point of not even realising they existed--seemed with her things one was lucky to have. "I thought you weren't coming." "I thought you wouldn't be here." "Have you missed me?" I kissed the top of her head: a melony perfume in the hair. "Where have you been?" "On Maurice's yacht. At Nauplia." "Is he here?" She nodded. "And the Negro?" "Somewhere." "Watching us?" "I said I didn't want him watching me all the time. Maurice says he won't. But I don't know." She felt in her cardigan pocket. "He's given me his whistle. To blow if I need help." "High opinion of me." "It's his same old trick." We began to walk towards the sea. After a moment I put my arm round her shoulders. "How long?" "Till eleven." "By the way. Those names. Tsimbou and Papaioannou. Unknown." She nodded. "We guessed." We began to walk along the edge of the trees between the water and the forest. "I asked one of the teachers of demotic about _Three Hearts_. It seems it is a sort of modern Greek classic. But he hadn't heard they were making a film. Obviously." She was silent. "Tell me what you've been doing." "Maurice has been alway. He sent us on a cruise. Down to a place called Kyparissi. It was nice. Except that we have to keep out of the sun all the time. Under the awning." I thought of my own two days: catching up on a backlog of marking, a prep duty, the smell of chalk, the smell of boys... the split being. She was silent again. "Sometimes I feel you're still Lily." She gave a little downbreath of amusement, but said nothing. "Julie?" "I'm sorry. I'm being difficult." She bowed her head. "What about next weekend?" "We're going to discuss it tomorrow." "Here?" "No. We're going back to Nauplia tonight." "What does June think about it all?" "She wants us to fly home." "Is this what's worrying you?" She nodded. "Where's June now?" "At the house. She says you obviously don't care what risks we're running." "Because of you." "And me because of you." I pressed her shoulder. "She's agreed that we should wait till next weekend." The last peacock-blue light hung in the west, over the black headland. It was tropically airless. She stopped for a moment to take off her cardigan coat. I carried it over my free arm, and we went on hand in hand. She said, "Whatever happens June won't play that part. I think Maurice knows she won't." "Where's he been away to?" "I don't know. He only came back tonight." She smiled briefly in the darkness. "On the way here he apologised to me twice mcre. Advice. About keeping you at arm's length." "Which you apparently take." We walked perhaps another five steps and then she said, "Please kiss me." She turned into my arms. Her mouth twisted under mine in a nervous need to shed all her masks, real and imposed. When we separated she gave me one of those slightly sullen under-the-eyebrows looks girls one has just aroused seem unable to repress. I put my arm round her shoulders again and we went on. She said, "I feel so desperate for Englishness sometimes. For knowing where you are with things." "I know." "Then I think it's cowardly. It's part of growing up, not clinging to England as if we'd drown if we ever let go. But if you hadn't come tonight.. We came to where the beach curved away out to the headland. I led her a little way into the trees, up a bill, and then sat down against a pine and made her curl against me. We kissed; tender-mouthed, though I felt too excited for tenderness. She let me undo the top button of her blouse and I caressed her throat, her shoulders. I ran my hand lower over a silky slip--her breast underneath, almost naked. She caught my wrist then, holding my hand still, where it was. "Please don't." "It's so nice." "Please don't. Not because it isn't nice." Gently, firmly she pushed my hand out, then sat up; then stood, turned, buttoned her blouse, and swiftly knelt beside me, her face in her hands, elbows on her knees. I stroked her hair. "I'm not using you." "I know you aren't." "Your body's so pretty. It's meant to be caressed." She took my hand and kissed it; then let herself be cradled again. She said, "Talk to me." "What about?" "About England. About Oxford, about anything." So I talked; and she was touchingly like a child, lying there with her eyes closed, occasionally asking a question, sometimes saying little bits about herself, but mainly content to listen. The sky became dark. I kissed her once or twice, but it became a silent closeness, a lying touching, in which time soundlessly hurtled on. She made me hold my wrist so that she could see the dial. It was five to eleven. "I must go." "Just a few minutes more." "I shouldn't..." but even while she was saying it her arms came up and around me and as if she had been restraining herself all evening she suddenly began to kiss me with passion. If at the first moment it seemed a degree desperate, more a determination than a desire to be passionate, it soon became real. The kiss went on and on, our positions changed, so that she was lying half on top of me. I could feel rising within me the exasperation of sexual desire, of the feel of encumbering clothes, everything that stands between skin and skin. Finally we were half struggling, half kissing. And then she was pushing, pulling herself away, on her feet, and shrill shock, the whistle sounded. I sprang up and caught her by the arms. "Why did you do that?" She gave me a racked look, mixed reproach and asking for forgiveness. "You make me wild." It seemed torn out of her, a kind of self-horror. Then she was in my arms again, being gripped frantically to me and wanting to be gripped, a brutally fierce kiss. But we both heard the quick pad of the running feet. She twisted round and free. Said in a low voice to him, "Stop there." He rocked on his feet, as if in two minds, then stood twenty yards away. I whispered, "I love you. I'm mad about you." She turned back to me; her hair had fallen loose and she looked strange, struck silent, her eyes so intense; as if she had begun to suspect me all over again. I took her face in my hands and drew her a little towards me, then whispered the words again; begging her to believe. "I love you." She bowed her head, then pulled on her cardigan, saying nothing, but standing so close that it said everything. I pulled her against me for a moment, and then she answered, in a voice so low I hardly heard. "I want you to love me." A last moment; then she ran past the Negro and down through the trees towards the shingle of the beach. For an instant the mothlike whiteness of her skirt showed; was swallowed up in darkness. The Negro leaned against a pine. He was without his mask and I felt more relaxed with him than before; sure that I was the tricker this time, he the tricked. "Would you like a cigarette?" No answer. "Just to show there are no hard feelings." Suddenly he switched a torch on; only for a second, but it dazzled me; and it was plainly to silence my tongue. "Thanks." For two or three minutes we stood in dense darkness and silence. I smoked, he watched. Then the torch went on again, but this time it pointed at a place in front of my feet, then moved towards the north. He was telling me to go home. "I am dismissed?" Again the torch pointed, swept sideways. I began to walk in the direction that would bring me to the path to the central ridge. He followed me, some thirty or forty yards behind. I halted and turned. "Is this really necessary?" But the torch flicked on again, and the beam pushed me away. I shrugged; continued. She loved me, she wanted me; and I carried the certainty of it inside me like alcohol. When we got to the path, and I turned up to the north, he stopped. Some forty yards later I looked back and he was still standing there. I went on without stopping for two hundred yards or so. It was a night with the thinnest of new moons; too dark to encourage a roundabout return to Bourani. I waited for the sound of a boat engine. And this time, in a few minutes, it came from the direction of the private beach; then headed east towards Nauplia. As I climbed the long path through the trees I thought of Julie; of her body, her mouth, a feeling that in another few minutes she would have given way... and my mind wandered lubriciously off to a Julie trained by familiarity, by love of me to do all those things that Alison did; all Alison's semi-professional skill with Julie's elegance, taste and intelligence. I was torn between wanting her and not wanting her; between doing things at my tempo and doing them at hers; happily torn. Walking on I began to think over the old centre to the whole enigma--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 psychosexual 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 Heisenberg principle into his masque, so that much of it was indeterminate, both to him as observer-voyeur and to us as observed human particles. One thing was certain: to use us so he must despise us. In spite of Julie's theory, it rankled in me that he called me unimaginative. I guessed that he partly wanted to taunt us with a false contrast between an all-wise Europe and a na