The Magus - John Fowles [89]
56
We saw Hermes climbing the path towards us. Julie sat up and smoothed back her hair. Every time she had tried to speak I had stopped her. Now she stood and looked down at me, almost sullenly, a strange new face. "What's wrong?" "You." She turned away. I stood behind her and put my hands on her hips; kissed the side of her neck. Hermes came toiling up the path in his methodical peasant way. We stood apart. He said he would lay the lunch "Maria" had left, and passed on. Slowly, hand in hand, we followed him back towards the house. "Come on. I hear he's told you the final, ultimate, absolute truth." She looked amazed, then teased, then amused; bowed her head with laughter. I jerked her hand. "What's so funny?" "Can't you guess?" Her bright eyes sideways on mine. "He..." She nodded. "He told us _you_ would be told everything last night." I looked to the east. "The last laugh. I might have known." "Perhaps he'll tell June." "Where is she?" "In Athens." "You must have had more confidence in Maurice than I did." "She's waiting to hear from me. We've agreed on a code. If I say Emily it means, Everything's fine, wait till I write. If I say Charlotte, it means, Come at once. If I say Anne, it means, Stay where you are till I come." "Emily?" "Emily." Her fingers laced into mine. I told her about the episode on the ridge, about what had happened that morning. We wandered through the vegetable garden and sat on the ground in the shade of the two loquats at the end. She took off her coat and lay back. "Maurice has been sweet these last two or three days. He's letting us keep our contract money." I kissed the palm of her hand. "Was he really disappointed?" "I felt... well, he did say. We were only just beginning the real play when we stopped." I looked down at her, at the shadows on her throat. "Are you disappointed?" She looked at me, smiled, and shook her head. I said, "And now?" She sat up. Her hair hid her face from me; silk-pale strands on the navy-blue shirt. "June's going to fly back to England." "That's not an answer." "Do you really need one?" I smiled, stroked her hair, then pulled her to me; turned her head and kissed her. After a moment she sank back and I lay beside her. Her shirt had rucked up and I bent and kissed her stomach, then touched her navel with my tongue, and she pressed my head down against her bare skin. The lunch stood on the table. Hermes picked up one of the roped crates as soon as he saw us, and began to carry it down to the beach. Four times he reappeared during the meal and went down with another crate. She went and changed out of her suit into pale blue trousers; dark blue, pale blue, changing before a walk... I remembered Alison. And looking at Julie, forgot her. We sat and ate; not very much. Neither of us was hungry. "I went mad while you were away. Trying to find out where you hid here." "Maurice thought someone in the village would tell you." "In the village?" She reached out and took a Kalamata olive; bit it, her amused eyes on mine. "I'll show you. If you're good." "I've just remembered. Some Latin poem Maurice asked me to ask you about. _Nullos_ something? By Catullus." "_Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle_..." "That was it." "The last line says, 'What a woman tells a passionate lover should be written in wind and running water." "Should it?" She dropped her eyes. "Ask me tomorrow." "I love you." But Hermes came to fetch the last picture crate and we were silent. I reached out with my bare foot and touched hers. Our eyes were serious, our feet played, pressed; soles and souls. We went up to my room to get my things. Julie stood in the door while I filled my dufflebag. I sat on the bed to tie up the strings round the neck. She came in and gently lifted the old photo of the house. The gecko clung to the wall. I said, "You've slept in this room." She nodded. I reached out and caught her hand, and made her sit beside me. We sat in silence, in the silent house, as if there were ghosts that could be listened to and heard. I kept on thinking of the bare skin under the shirt; of her body; and then of how much more than bare skin and body she was. Perhaps it was seeing her in contemporary clothes; but I was intensely aware of her in a new nonsexual way. As a companion, a partner in life; in some ways, as an innocent--a very intelligent innocent, but one that needed protecting, cherishing; and her innocense, living up to. I felt a new sort of ardour, an anxious desire to hide nothing from her, to have nothing of her hidden from me. I was longing to tell her about Alison, longing for her sympathy and understanding. But the lie I had told her a fortnight before stood like a black guard, like Joe, between me and the absolving sunlight. As soon as we had consummated the physical thing, I would go to confession; and even then I knew a little wave of relief at the thought that there was now only one witness of that weekend in Athens. Those moments on Parnassus need never he told. As a substitute, to confess something, I told her about the letters I had written: to the bank, to her mother. "I don't mind. We've done the same." "The same!" "June telephoned the British Council. From Nauplia. Years ago." We grinned. Silence. Hands. "Julie." "Nicholas." Always those tenderly impenetrable eyes. "I want to marry you." She withdrew her hands gently. I moved closer and put my arms round her shoulders. "What's wrong?" "I want you to take me to bed with you first." "But I'm dying to. You know I am." She misinterpreted my movement. "Not here." "Of course not here." "I'm so frightened that you'll be disappointed." I shook her. "You're just a neurotic spinster." "I know." "I'll be as patient and gentle as..." She gave me a quick smile, then stood up and went to the door. We remained staring at each other. She murmured, "Not too gentle." I followed her fair head down the stairs. She went ahead of me into the music room, then whisked round, playful, a sudden idea. She said just one word. "Encore?" I knew what she meant. I stood back against the wall. She disappeared, a pause, the sound of a drawer opening, then she was standing in the doorway, with the recorder flue brush in her hand; with miraculously the same look at me, the same secret look back at the Conchis who now was not there, the same leaning forward to push me away. But this time I caught her wrist and pulled her out of the music room into the little corridor; drew the door to, so that we stood in the cool darkness, watching, not playing, very close; and she came into my arms. I kissed her until she twisted her head away with a little gasp; then made her turn. I held her back against me, slipped my right hand inside her trousers, spread my fingers over her naked stomach. She held my wrist. I tenderly bit her neck, murmured her name over and over again, slipped my other hand under her shirt and up her bare back and unhooked the bra; then, unresisted, caressed my way under her warm arm to her breasts, small breasts that I could just span with one hand; and so held her against me; our hot nakednesses through the thin clothes. She made little movements; then surrendered. Minutes passed. I whispered. "Promise I can hold you tonight like this." She nodded. "Undress you and hold you like this." She raised my right hand and kissed it. We heard Hermes's footsteps coming over the gravel outside. I refastened her bra, and she shook her hair straight. A moment in the shadows, shadowy eyes. "You make me feel I've never touched a girl before." "You make me feel I've never been touched." Under the colonnade, Hermes stood waiting. He went and locked the music-room doors from the inside; let himself out by the front door. I said we would be at the house in the village about six, and then we watched him go down the path with Julie's suitcase. We were alone. Silence, the cicadas. Her mouth looked bruised, her eyes almost violet; a heavy, emotion-laden look at me, as if she blamed me and forgave me, forgave me and blamed me... I reached out my hand. "I've been good." She recovered herself then, laughed and remembered, and led me to the steps over the gulley; I heard the sound of the boat drawing out of the private cove. To my surprise Julie turned down past the carob. We came to the edge of the trees, between the small hummock where I had met the sisters and the place where we had lain on Julie's rug and the whole story had been told. Twenty yards away the cliff dropped straight into the sea. The ground was rough. There were small boulders, some matted whinlike scrub, thyme and other aromatic plants; the huge dry brown bulbs of asphodels. "Here. See if you can find it." She stood under a pine and watched me quarter the innocent ground. I searched for a raised neck, a cap of some sort; threw a sharp look back at her. She had her hand to her mouth, in suspense. I was near. Just in front of me there was the stump of a pine that had been cut down many years before. Around it an area of about five feet by three was bare, apparently because of the stones, or because the dead stem had poisoned the ground in some way. It seemed perfectly natural, but Julie was smiling. The stones were, on a second examination, suspiciously thick around the stump. And as soon as I actually stood on the bare patch I realised something else. The stones did not budge under my feet; they were cemented in. Julie came down through the low undergrowth to beside me. Pointed. Beyond the stump was a stone a foot or so long, seemingly embedded in the ground--or concreted, like the rest. But it was loose, though difficult to lift till I moved it sideways. Underneath was a hinged iron ring, lying flat in a recess. Gradually I could make out the outline of a trapdoor. It was very irregular; and the tree stump had been cemented into the middle of it. "I'll show you." She stooped to grip the ring. "Wait a minute. It must be as heavy as hell." "It's counterbalanced." She strained for a moment and then swiftly a whole jagged section of the ground rose in the air. I looked down. An oval hole about a yard in widest diameter, descending vertically, like a huge pipe; an iron ladder against the wall. From the inside of the door hung two wire cables ending in what looked like lead weights four or five feet down the pipe--the counterbalance. I looked at the door again. It was flanged with rocks so cemented that from above they broke the line of the edge. "What on earth..." She smiled. "The Germans. In the war." I hit my head. Of course. A gun emplacement. Conchis would simply have concealed the entrance; blocked off the front slits. "What about the stone over the ring?" She showed me. It too had a hook that kept it in place. Then she turned at the brink, put her hands onto the ground and felt her feet onto the rungs of the iron ladder. In ten seconds she was out of sight; could have pulled the "lid" down, and anyone coming over the rise of ground from inland would have been completely at a loss. She reached the bottom some fifteen feet below and called; a hollow subterranean timbre to her voice; pale face upturned. I began to clamber down after her. It was unpleasantly claustrophobic. But at the bottom, opposite the ladder, was a triangular room running towards the cliff. Not very large; equilateral twelvefoot sides. On the side farthest from the ladder I could just make out two doors. Julie was standing by one of them. She came back towards me, to the foot of the ladder. "The doors are locked." She seemed surprised. "Shouldn't they be? I expect Hermes has been down." "Have you got a match?" I struck one. The left wall of the triangular room was painted with a lurid mural--a beer cellar scene, foaming stems of beer, bosomy girls with winking eyes. Dim traces showed that there had once been colours, but now it was only black outlines that remained. As remote as an Etruscan wall painting; of a culture long-sunken under time. On the right-hand wall was something much more skillful--a perspective street scene that I didn't recognise, but guessed to be of some Austrian city. Vienna perhaps. I guessed, too, that Anton had helped to execute it. I lit a fourth match. There were two heavy doors like bulkhead doors aboard a ship. Both had massive padlocks. She nodded. "That was our room, to the right. Joe used this one." "What a god-awful place. It smells." "I know. We used to call it the earth. Have you ever smelt a fox earth?" "What's behind the doors?" "Just costumes. Beds. More murals." I saw the wire running in over the top left-hand door. "And a field telephone. Where did it go?" "To his bedroom." "Are there more places like this?" "Two more. Just to hide in." "That day on the beach." She nodded, smiled in the feeble light from the pipe to the surface. "You're a brave girl. To face this sort of thing." "I hated it." She looked round. "So many sour, unhappy men." I followed her back to the foot of ladder. I was thinking of a place under the bluff on the central ridge, a little corner shaded by pine trees, absolutely private, thickly carpeted with pine needles; to take her there, and take her, with a gentle roughness, a romantic brutality; as, and I did not shirk the parallel, I had taken Alison on Parnassus; and because I had taken her; the sad sweet poetry of echoes. Julie began to climb the ladder; slim blue legs. The white daylight dazzled down. I waited a moment at the bottom, to keep clear of her feet, than started after her. The top of her body disappeared. And then she screamed my name. Someone had caught her arms and was dragging her away. Her legs kicked wildly sideways, then vanished. My name again, but cut off short. A scuffle of stones. I clawed violently up the remaining rungs. For one fraction of a second a face appeared in the opening above. Young, with crewcut blond hair. I had an idea he was German, one of the "soldiers," though he was wearing a black shirt. He saw I was still two rungs from the top, and immediately slammed the lid down. I shouted in the pitch darkness. "For God's sake! Hey. Wait a minute!" I pressed up furiously on the underside of the lid. It gave a fraction, as if someone was standing or sitting on it. But it wouldn't move further. I strained to heave it up. Then listened. Silence. I tried the lid again, as unrewardingly as before. After a while I climbed down to the bottom. I struck a match and examined the two massive doors. They were impenetrable. Snarling with rage, I remembered Conchis's fairy-godfather smiles. The great farewell. Our revels now are ended. He must have hugged himself with joy when I called his bluff and produced my letter. I saw why he had taunted me. He _wanted_ me to tell him I loved Julie. His plan was always to be ruined. Her false departure was always to be cancelled. And Julie? I was flooded with old doubts about her. But had she tried to delay me at the bottom of the ladder? No. And she could easily have dropped something. Had she enticed me into the place? No, I had brought the subject up myself, both times. He had tricked her as well. Perhaps he was jealous of us--not only sexually jealous, but jealous of us as rebellious puppets. I thought of how near I had been to having her. To teaching her that there were things in which I was skilled, wise, both passionate and patient. I swore aloud with frustrated rage and went up the ladder again to bang on the lid with one of the counterweights. But it was a waste of time. So I sat at the foot of the ladder and seethed, trying to plumb Conchis's duplicities; to read his palimpsest. His "theatre without an audience" made no sense, it couldn't be the explanation. The one thing all actors and actresses craved was an audience. Perhaps what he was doing sprang from some theory about the theatre--he had said it himself: _The masque is only a metaphor_. A strange and incomprehensible new philosophy? Metaphorism? Perhaps he saw himself as a professor in an impossible faculty of ambiguity, a sort of Empson of the event. I thought and thought, and thought again, and arrived at nothing. Half an hour and five attempts later the lid smoothly gave. I ran up into the trees to where I could see inland, but the landscape was empty. Behind the lid stood my dufflebag, where I had left it, untouched. The house too was as we had left it, shuttered blind. And then, standing under the colonnade, I recalled that first plan: how Julie would have been waiting in my room while I raged as I was raging then over at Bourani. I began to suspect her again, but only of having played this last trick, this doubly false _coda_, for Conchis. I started walking fast down the track to the gate. And there, just as on that very first visit, I found that I had been left a clue.