The Magus - John Fowles [8]
�y living among the most beautiful landscapes in the world, there was nothing discordant in being cooped up in such a system; but it drove me mad with irritation. One or two of the masters spoke some English, and several French, but I found little in common with them. The only one I could tolerate was Demetriades, the other teacher of English, and that was solely because he spoke and understood the language so much better than anyone else. With him I could rise out of Basic. He took me round the village _kapheneia_ and tavernas, and I got a taste for Greek food and Greek folk music. But there was always something mournful about the place in daylight. There were so many villas boarded up; there were so few people in the alley streets; one had always to go to the same two better-class tavernas for a meal, and one met the same old faces, a stale Levantine provincial society that belonged more to the world of the Ottoman Empire, Baizac in a fez, than to the 1950's. I had to agree with Mitford. It was desperately dull. I tried one or two of the fishermen's wineshops. They were jollier, but I felt they felt I was slumming; and my Greek never began to cope with the island dialect they spoke. I made enquiries about the man Mitford had had a row with, but no one seemed to have heard of either him or it; or, for that matter, of the "waiting room." Mitford had evidently spent a lot of time in the village; and made himself unpopular with other masters besides Demetriades; there was a heavy aftermath of anglophobia, aggravated by the political situation at that time, which I had to suffer. Soon I took to the hills. None of the other masters ever stirred an inch further than they needed to, and the boys were not allowed beyond the _chevaux de frise_ of the high-walled school grounds except on Sundays, and then only for the half-mile along the coast road to the village. The hills were always intoxicatingly clean and light and remote. With no company but my own boredom, I began for the first time in my life to look at nature, and to regret that I knew its Ianguage as little as I knew Greek. I became aware of stones, birds, flowers, land, in a new way, and the walking, swimming, the magnificent climate, the absence of all traffic--ground or air, for there wasn't a single car on the island, there being no roads outside the village, and airplanes passed over not once a month--these things made me feel healthier than I had ever felt before. I began to get some sort of harmony between body and mind; or so it seemed. It was an illusion. There had been a letter from Alison waiting for me when I arrived at the school. It was very brief. She must have written it at work the day I left London. _I love you, you can't understand what that means because you've never loved anyone yourself. It's what I've been trying to make you see this last week. All I want to say is that one day, when you do fall in love, remember today. Remember I kissed you and walked out of the room. Remember I walked all the way down the street and never once looked back. I knew you were watching. Remember I did all this and I love you. If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you forever for today._ Another letter came from her the next day. It contained nothing but my check torn in two and a scribble on the back of one half: _No thanks._ And two days later there was a third letter, full of enthusiasm for some film she had been to see, almost a chatty letter. But at the end she wrote: _Forget the first letter I sent you. I was so upset. It's all over now. I won't be old-fashioned again._ Of course I wrote back, if not every day, two or three times a week; long letters full of self-excuse and seff-justification until one day she wrote _Please don't go on so about you and me. Tell me about things, about the island, the school. I know what you are. So be what you are. When you write about things I can think I'm with you, seeing them with you. And don't be offended. Forgiving's forgetting._ Imperceptibly information took the place of emotion in our letters. She wrote to me about her work, a girl she had become friendly with, about minor domestic things, films, books. I wrote about the school and the island, as she asked. One day there was a photo of her in her uniform. She'd had her hair cut short and it was tucked back under her fore-and-aft cap. She was smiling, but the uniform and the smile combined gave her an insincere, professional look; she had become, the photo sharply warned me, a stranger, someone not the someone I liked to remember; the private, the uniquely my, Alison. And then the letters became once-weekly. The physical ache I had felt for her during the first weeks seemed to disappear; there were still times when I knew I wanted her very much, and would have given anything to have her in bed beside me. But they were moments of sexual frustration, not regretted love. One day I thought: if I wasn't on this island I should be dropping this girl. The writing of the letters had become as often as not more of a chore than a pleasure, and I didn't hurry back to my room after dinner to write them--I scribbled them off hurriedly in class and got a boy to run down to the gate at the last minute to give them to the school postman. At half-term I went with Demetriades to Athens. He wanted to take me to his favourite brothel, in a suburb. He assured me the girls were clean. I hesitated, then.-- isn't it a poet's, to say nothing of a cynic's, moral duty to be immoral?--I went. When we came out of it, it was raining, and the shadowing wet leaves on the lower branches of a eucalyptus, caught under a light in the entrance, made me remember our bedroom in Russell Square. But Alison and London were gone, dead, exorcised; I had cut them away from my life. I decided I would write a letter to Alison that night, to say that I didn't want to hear from her again. I was too drunk by the time we got back to the hotel, and I don't know what I would have said. Perhaps, that I had proved beyond doubt that I was not worth waiting for; perhaps that she bored me; perhaps that I was lonelier than ever--and wanted to stay that way. As it was, I sent her a postcard telling her nothing; and on the last day I went back to the brothel alone. But the Lebanese nymphet I coveted was taken and I didn't fancy the others. December came, and we were still writing letters. I knew she was hiding things from me. Her life, as she described it, was too simple and manless to be true. When the final letter came, I was not surprised. What I hadn't expected was how bitter I should feel, and how betrayed. It was less a sexual jealousy of the man than an envy of Alison; moments of tenderness and togetherness, moments when the otherness of the other disappeared flooded back through my mind for days afterwards, like sequences from some cheap romantic film that I certainly didn't want to remember, but did; and there was the read and reread letter; and that such things could be ended so, by two hundred stale, worn words. _DEAR NICHOLAS,_ _I can't go on any more. I'm so terribly terribly sorry if this hurts you. Please believe that I'm sorry, please don't be angry with me for knowing you will be hurt. I can see you saying, I'm not hurt._ _I got so terribly lonely and depressed. I haven't told you how much, I can't tell you how much. Those first days I kept up such a brave front at work, and then at home I collapsed._ _I'm sleeping with Pete again when he's in London. It started two weeks ago. Please please believe me that I wouldn't be if I thought... you know. I know you know. I don't feel about him as I used to do, and don't begin to feel about him as I felt about you, you can't be jealous._ _It's just that he's so uncomplicated, he stops me thinking, he stops me being lonely, I've sunk back into all the old Australians-in-London thing again. We may marry. I don't know._ _It's terrible. I still want to write to you, and you to me. I keep on remembering._ _Goodbye._ _ALISON_ _You will be different for me. Always. That very first letter I wrote the day you left. If you could only understand._ I wrote a letter in reply to say that I had been expecting her letter, that she was perfectly free. But I tore it up. I realised that if anything might hurt her, silence would. I wanted to hurt her.