The Magus - John Fowles [80]
52
I had another letter from England on Saturday. There was a small black eagle on the flap: Barclay's Bank. _DEAR MR. URFE,_ _Thank you for writing to me upon the recommendation of the Misses Holmes. I have pleasure in enclosing a form which I hope you will kindly fill in and return to me and also a small booklet with details of the special services we can offer overseas customers._ _Yours truly,_ _P. J. FEARN,_ _Manager_ I looked up from reading it into the eyes of the boy who sat opposite me at table, and gave him a small smile; the unsuppressed smile of the bad poker player. Half an hour later I was climbing through the windless forest to the central ridge. The mountains were reduced to a pale insubstantiality by the heat, and the islands to the east rose and trembled shimmeringly over the sea, a strange optical illusion, like spinning tops. On the central ridge I moved along to a place where there was shade and a view down over Bourani; and sat there for an hour, in limbo, with the death of Alison still dark inside me and the hope of Julie, Julie now confirmed as Julie, there below me in the south. Gradually, those last two days, I had begun to absorb the fact of Alison's death; that is, had begun to edge it out of the moral world into the aesthetic, where it was easier to live with. By this sinister elision, this slipping from true remorse, the belief that the suffering we have precipitated ought to ennoble _us_, or at least make us less ignoble from then on, to disguised self-forgiveness, the belief that suffering in some way ennobles _life_, so that the precipitation of pain comes, by such a cockeyed algebra, to equal the ennoblement, or at any rate the enrichment, of life, by this characteristically twentieth-century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from _aqua_ into _unda_, I dulled the pain of that accusing death; and hardened myself to say nothing of it at Bourani. I was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked likely to be high. Before I moved off I took out the headed Barclay's letter and read it again. It had the effect of making me feel more indulgent towards Conchis than I had intended to be. I saw no objection now to a few small last dissimulations--on both sides. It was like the first day. The being uninvited, unsure; the going through the gate, approaching the house in its silent sunlit mystery, going round the colonnade; and there too it was the same, the tea table covered in muslin. No one present. The sea and the heat through the arches, the tiled floor, the silence, the waiting. And although I was nervous for different reasons, even that was the same. I put my duffiebag on the cane settee and went into the music room. A figure stood up from behind the harpsichord. He had evidently been sitting on the music stool, reading a book, which he put down as soon as I appeared. "Nicholas." "Hello, Mr. Conchis." My voice was neutral. He came and shook my hand, gave me a scrutiny; the characteristic rapid movement of his head. "I am invited?" "Of course. Did I not say?" "I wasn't sure." "You are well?" "Slightly bruised." I raised my hand, which was scarred and still red from the daubings of Mercurochrome the school nurse had put on it. "How did you do that?" He asked the question with a perfect effrontery. "I tripped over something as I was running." He took me to the door, insisted on examining the hand. "You must be careful. There is always the danger of tetanus." "I intend to be." He examined my bleak smile rather as he had looked at the hand. With the minutest of shrugs, which might or might not have been apologetic, he took my arm and led me out towards the tea table; then went to the corner. "Maria!" He came back to the table, and whisked the muslin away. We sat down. "How was Geneva?" "Dull." He offered me a sandwich. "I foolishly entered a financing consortium two years ago. Can you imagine Versailles with not one _Roi Soleil_, but seven of them?" "Financing what?" "Many things." Marie appeared with the tray. "But tell me what you have been doing." "Nothing." I returned his oblique smile. "Waiting." He took the compliment with a little bow; and turned to the tea things. I said, "I met Barba Dimitraki the other day. By chance." He poured the tea into the cups, so unsurprised that I suspected he already knew. But the keen, bright look he gave me as he handed me my cup appeared to convey a certain admiration; as if he might have underestimated me. "And what did he tell you?" "Very little. But I understand that I have more fellow victims than I thought." "Victims?" "A victim is someone who has something inflicted on him without being given any real choice." He sipped his tea. "That sounds an excellent definition of man." "I should like an excellent definition of God." "Yes. Of course." He put his cup down and folded his arms; he seemed in an excellent humour, at his most Picasso-like and dangerous. "I was going to wait until tomorrow. But no matter." He glanced at my hand but he seemed to hint at something other. At Julie? The smile lingered in his face, lingered and threatened, and then he said, "Well. What do you think I am doing?" "Preparing to make a fool of me again?" He smiled almost benignly at me, as if that afternoon I was constantly surprising him, and shook his head. "Now you have met Barba Dimitraki..." He left one of his characteristic long pauses, then went on. "Before the war we used to amuse ourselves with my private theatre here. And during the war, when I had a great deal of time to think, and no friends to amuse me, no theatre, I conceived a new kind of drama. One in which the conventional relations between audience and actors were forgotten. In which the conventional scenic geography, the notions of proscenium, stage, auditorium, were completely discarded. In which continuity of performance, either in time or place, was ignored. And in which the action, the narrative was fluid, with only a point of departure and a fixed point of conclusion." His mesmeric eyes pinned mine. "You will find that Artaud and Pirandello and Brecht were all thinking, in their different ways, along similar lines. But they had neither the money nor the will--and perhaps not the time--to think as far as I did. The element that they could never bring themselves to discard was the audience." He spread his arms. "Here we are all actors. None of us are as we really are." He raised his hand quickly. "Yes, I know. You think you are not acting. Just pretending a little. But you have much to learn about yourself. You are as far from your true self as that Egyptian mask Our American friend wears is from his true face." I gave him a warning look. "He's not my American friend." "If you had seen him play Othello, you would not say that. He is a very fine young actor." "He must be. I thought he was meant to be a mute." His smile was almost mischievous. "Then I have proved my praise." "Rather a waste of a very fine young actor." "His part is not ended yet." He sat watching me; the old humorlessly amused look. "And you are the producer?" "No. This year the director is a very old friend of mine. He used to come here before the war." "Shall I meet him?" "That depends on him. But I think not." "Why on him?" "Because I am an actor too, Nicholas, in this strange new metatheatre. That is why I say things both of us know cannot be true. Why I am permitted to lie. And why I do not want to know everything. I also wish to be surprised." I remembered something Julie had said: _He wants us to be mysteries to him as well_. But it was obviously a very limited freedom and mystery he wanted in us; however large an aviary the fancier builds, the aviary's purpose is still to imprison. "Your bank balance must get some surprises, too." "My dear Nicholas, the tragedy of being very rich is that one's bank balance is incapable of giving one surprises. Pleasant or otherwise. But I confess that this is the most ambitious of our creations. That is partly because you have played your part so well." I smiled; lit a cigarette. "I feel I should ask for a salary." "You will receive the highest salary of all." Julie: _a present, a surprise for you_. An unexpected possibility shot through me, which I smothered; but I heard an unintended note of deference in my voice. "I didn't know that." "Perhaps you will never know it." He added drily, "I am not talking of money. And it is also the most ambitious of our creations for the very simple reason that for me there may never be another year." "Your heart?" "My heart." But he looked immortally tanned and fit; in any case, distanced any sympathy. A silence came between us. I said, "Lily?" "You will see Lily later." "I didn't mean that." "Before you tell me what you do mean, let me assure you that after this weekend you will never see her again. In your life. That is the fixed point of conclusion this summer." This was the "last trick" of Julie's letter. I guessed it; to make me think I had lost everything, then to give it to me. I gave him a cool look. "'In my life' is a long time." "Nevertheless, the comedy is nearly over." "But I intend to see the actress home afterwards." "She has promised that, no doubt." "No doubt." He stood up. "Her promises are worth nothing. When you see her tomorrow to say goodbye, ask her to repeat to you the poem of Catullus that begins _Nulli se dicit mulier mea_." "Which you've taught her?" "No. Lily is an excellent classical scholar, and she has an excellent memory." He remained staring rather fiercely down at me. I stood as well; but I was enjoying it, the bluffing. "Of course you can prevent me seeing her again here. But what happens when we leave the island is really... with respect... our business. Not yours." "I am trying to warn you. As you say, I cannot stop you meeting away from the island. So you must draw your own conclusions. You may think you arrived here for our first tea together by pure hazard. You did not. If you had not come here that day, partly of your own free will, we should have ensured that you were definitely here by the next weekend. Similarly we have our fixed point of conclusion. You will be foolish to fight it." "Can you command people's emotions so easily?" He smiled. "When you know the plot." I felt myself getting irritated then. That was probably his intention. A little bat's wing of fear flickered through my mind. There were so many things he could do at Bourani, so many surprises he could spring besides whatever Julie believed was to come. He reached out his hand for me to come round the table. "Nicholas. Go back to England and make it up with this girl you spoke of. Marry her and have a family and learn to be what you really are." I had my eyes on the ground. I wanted to shout at him that Alison was dead; and largely because he had woven Julie's life through mine. I trembled on the brink of telling him I wanted no more deceptions, no more comedy, _rose ou noir_. Perhaps I really wanted to squeeze some sympathy out of that dry heart. "Is that how you learn what you are? Marrying and having a family?" "Why not?" "A steady job and a house in the suburbs?" "Excellent." "I'd rather die." He gave a shrug of regret, but as if he didn't really care. "Come. You have never heard me play my clavichord." I followed him indoors and upstairs. He went to the little table and lifted the lid revealing the keyboard underneath. I sat by his closed desk, watching the Bonnards. He began to play. Those Bonnards, their eternal outpouring of a golden happiness, haunted me; they were like windows on a world I had tried to reach all my life, and failed; they had reminded me of Alison, or rather of the best of my relationship with Alison, before; and now they bred a kind of Watteau-like melancholy in me, the forevergoneness of pictures like _L'Embarcation pour Cythere_. As if Bonnard had captured a reality so real that it could not exist; or only as a dream, a looking back and seeing where the way was lost and if it had not been lost but it had been lost... then I thought of Julie. One day I should see her so, naked at a sunlit window; my naked wife. I turned to glance at her photo by the window, and realised that it wasn't there; or anywhere else in the room. It hadn't just been moved, but removed. The small muted notes of the clavichord barely filled the room. It was clipped, fluttering, with whimpering vibratos, remotely plangent. He played a series of little Elizabethan almans and voltas. Then a Bach-like _gigue_. Finally, a small set of variations; each variation ended in the same chanting silvery chorus. He came to an end and looked round at me. "I liked that last one." Without a word he played the chorus again. "Byrd. But the tune is much older. It is called Rosasolis. The English archers sang it at Agincourt." He shut the clavichord, and turned with a smile that was of dismissal; once again manipulating my exits and entries. "Nicholas, I have much to attend to. I must ask you to leave me in peace for an hour or so." I stood up. "No work?" "You wish to work?" "No." "Then we will meet for _ouzo_." I thought that perhaps he wanted me to go out of doors, that Julie would be waiting there. So I went down. In the music room I saw that the other photo of Lily had also disappeared. I strolled idly all round the domaine, in the windless air; I waited in all the likely places; I kept on turning, looking backwards, sideways, listening. But the landscape seemed dead. Nothing and no one appeared. The theatre was empty; and, like all empty theatres, it became in the end frightening. We silently toasted each other, across the lamplit table with the ouzo and the olives, under the colonnade. Apparently we were to have dinner there that night, for the other table, laid for two, had been placed at the western end of the colonnade, looking out over the trees. I stood beside Conchis at the front steps. A breath of dead air washed over us. "I hoped you would tell me more about previous years here." He smiled. "In the middle of a performance?" "I thought this was a sort of interval." "There are no intervals here, Nicholas." He took my arm. "After dinner I am going to tell you the story of the execution. And now I am going to tell you what happened when I returned to France. After Seidevarre. If you are interested?" "Of course." He gestured with his glass. "Let us stroll as far as the seat. It will be cooler." We went down the steps and across the gravel into the trees. As we walked, he talked. "It took me many months to learn how much I had changed. As one learns of a distant earthquake by the imperceptible shakings of a needle on a seismograph. I gradually came to understand that I was really by nature a very different person from what I had previously imagined. I had, you remember, many new notes on bird sounds to collate and work through. But I found that I had no real interest in the subject after all. That in fact I preferred the mystery of birds' voices to any scientific explanation of them. Something analogous happened in every department of my life. When I looked back I saw that there had always been a discord in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued the latter, worshipped the latter, as a doctor, and as a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and classify it and vivisect it out of existence, was like trying to remove all the air from atmosphere. In the creating of the vacuum it was the experimenter who died, because he was inside the vacuum. All this change in me came just when I unexpectedly found myself presented with the money and the leisure to do what I wanted in life. At that time I interpreted that last question of de Deukans as a warning. I was to look for the water, not the wave. So." We came to the seat overlooking the dark sea. "And you came to Greece?" "I did not come to Greece to... look for water. I came because my mother was dying of cancer. Like myself, she had always resisted any idea of coming here. Or rather, I learnt my unwillingness to face Greece from her. But when she knew she was dying she suddenly wanted to see it one last time. So we took a boat from Marseilles. This was in 1928. I shall never forget seeing her come on deck one morning. In brilliant sunshine. And finding herself in the Gulf of Corinth, which we had entered during the night. She stood gripping the rail. Facing the mountains of Achaia with the tears streaming down her face. Lacerated with joy. I could not feel it then. But later I did. By the end of the holiday I knew that I too had gained a homeland. Perhaps I should say a motherland. My mother died four months after we returned to Paris." "And you came here." "I came here. I told you why. But it also reminded me very much of Norway. Like Henrik Nygaard, like de Deukans, in their different ways, I have always craved for territory. I use the word in the technical ornithological sense. A fixed domaine on which no other of my species may trespass." He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practising medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I travelled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover--that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it." "When did you start your theatre here?" "Friends used to come. They were bored. Very often they bored me, because an amusing person in Paris can become insufferable on an Aegean island. We had a little fixed theatre, a stage. Where the Priapus is now. We began to write our own plays." He turned. "_Et voil