The Magus - John Fowles [81]
�" The new-risen moon was amber, hazed, and made the sea glisten turgidly. A few crickets cheeped, but we sat before a dropsied, listless silence. Far away to the west over the black mountains of the mainland I saw the nervous, thunderless flicker of summer lightning. I sprang my question on him, out of the silence, in his own style. "Is your dislike of me a part of your part?" He was undisconcerted. "Liking is not important. Between men." I felt the _ouzo_ in me. "Even so, you don't like me." His dark eyes turned on mine. "I am to answer?" I nodded. "No. But I like very few people. And no longer any of your sex and age. Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society. It is one I have long banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me." From the house the bell rang, and we walked back slowly through the trees. Maria's shadow moved under the arches, round the whiteand-silver table. It was like a stage setting, and I had the sharp realisation that this was presumably the last dinner Conchis and I should have together. I wanted desperately to have Julie at my side, to have that situation solved; but I found myself wishing that the masque, despite all its asperities and shocks and uglinesses, could have also continued. Almost as soon as we had started eating I heard the footsteps of two or three people on the gravel round by Maria's cottage. I glanced back from my soup, but the table had been, no doubt deliberately, placed where it was impossible to see. "Tonight I wish to illustrate my story," said Conchis. "I thought you'd done that already. And only too vividly." "These are real documents." He indicated that I should go on eating, he would say nothing more. I heard footsteps on the terrace outside his bedroom, above our heads. There was a tiny squeal, the scrape of metal. I tried to get a conversation going while we ate the kid Maria had cooked for us, but he did not bother to keep up the host-guest fiction anymore. He did not want to talk, and that was that. At last Maria brought the coffee, which she placed on the table by the front steps. Conchis stood up, excused himself for a moment, and disappeared upstairs. I looked back from the edge of the colonnade towards the cottage; nothing unusual. I strolled a few steps out on the gravel and peered up, but once again there was nothing to be seen. Conchis returned very shortly with a large cardboard file, and gestured to me to bring the chairs to the front steps. We sat, facing the sea, the table between us, evidently waiting. I was silent, on my guard. Then I heard footsteps again on the gravel and my heart leapt because I thought it was Julie, that we had been waiting for her. But it was a man, the black-dressed Negro, carrying a long bundle. He crossed to in front of us and then, at the edge of the gravel, he set the bundle on its tripod end and I realised what it was--a small cinema screen. There was a ratcheting noise and he unfurled the white square; adjusted it. Someone called in a low voice from above. "_Entaxi_." All right. A Greek voice I didn't recognise. I turned to Conchis. "Isn't Lily going to see this?" "No. I would be ashamed to present this to her." "Ashamed?" "Because these events could have taken place only in a world where man considered himself superior to woman. In what the Americans call a 'man's world.' That is, a world governed by brute force, humourless arrogance, illusory prestige and primeval stupidity." He stared at the screen. "Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling that we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women--and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death." He stopped and turned down the lamp to the faintest glimmer. His mask face looked as grim as I could remember having seen it. Then he said, "I will begin."