The Magus Read online

  * * *

  There was a simpler Alison, when the mascara was off; she had not been typical of herself, that first evening; but still always a little unpredictable, ambiguous. One never knew when the more sophisticated, bruised-hard persona would reappear. She would give herself violently; then yawn at the wrongest moment. She would spend all one day clearing up the flat, cooking, ironing, then pass the next three or four bohemianly on the floor in front of the fire, reading Lear, women’s magazines, a detective story, Hemingway—not all at the same time, but bits of all in the same afternoon. She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them.

  One day she came back with an expensive fountain pen.

  “For monsieur.”

  “But you shouldn’t.”

  “It’s okay. I stole it.”

  “Stole it!”

  “I steal everything. Didn’t you realize?”

  “Everything!”

  “I never steal from small shops. Only the big stores. They ask for it. Don’t look so shocked.”

  “I’m not.” But I was. I stood holding the pen gingerly. She grinned.

  “It’s just a hobby.”

  “Six months in Holloway wouldn’t be so funny.”

  She had poured herself a whisky. “Santé. I hate big stores. And not just capitalists. Pommy capitalists. Two birds with one steal. Oh, come on, sport, smile.” She put the pen in my pocket. “There. Now you’re a cassowary after the crime.”

  “I need a Scotch.”

  Holding the bottle, I remembered she had “bought” that as well. I looked at her. She nodded.

  She stood beside me as I poured. “Nicholas, you know why you take things too seriously? Because you take yourself too seriously.” She gave me an odd little smile, half tender, half mocking, and went away to peel potatoes. And I knew that in some obscure way I had offended her; and myself.

  * * *

  One night I heard her say a name in her sleep.

  “Who’s Michel?” I asked the next morning.

  “Someone I want to forget.”

  But she talked about everything else; about her English-born mother, genteel but dominating; about her father, a stationmaster who had died of cancer four years before.

  “That’s why I’ve got this crazy between voice. It’s Mum and Dad living out their battles again every time I open my mouth. I suppose it’s why I hate Australia and I love Australia and I couldn’t ever be happy there and yet I’m always feeling homesick. Does that make sense?”

  She was always asking me if she made sense.

  “I went to see the old family in Wales. Mum’s brother. Jesus. Enough to make the wallabies weep.”

  But she found me very English, very fascinating. Partly it was because I was “cultured,” a word she often used. Pete had always “honked” at her if she went to galleries or concerts. She mimicked him: “What’s wrong with the boozer, girl?”

  One day she said, “You don’t know how nice Pete is. Besides being a bastard. I always know what he wants, I always know what he thinks, and what he means when he says anything. And you, I don’t know anything. I offend you and I don’t know why. I please you and I don’t know why. It’s because you’re English. You couldn’t ever understand that.”

  She had finished high school in Australia, and had even had a year doing languages at Sydney University. But then she had met Pete, and it “got complicated.” She’d had an abortion and come to England.

  “Did he make you have the abortion?”

  She was sitting on my knees.

  “He never knew.”

  “Never knew!”

  “It could have been someone else’s. I wasn’t sure.”

  “You poor kid.”

  “I knew if it was Pete’s he wouldn’t want it. And if it wasn’t his he wouldn’t have it. So.”

  “Weren’t you—”

  “I didn’t want a baby. It would have got in the way.” But she added more gently, “Yes, I was.”

  “And still?”

  A silence, a small shrug.

  “Sometimes.”

  I couldn’t see her face. We sat in silence, close and warm, both aware that we were close and aware that we were embarrassed by the implications of this talk about children. In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.

  One evening we went to see Carne’s old film Quai des Brumes. She was crying when we came out and she began to cry again when we were in bed. She sensed my disapproval.

  “You’re not me. You can’t feel like I feel.”

  “I can feel.”

  “No you can’t. You just choose not to feel or something, and everything’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine. It’s just not so bad.”

  “That film made me feel what I feel about everything. There isn’t any meaning. You try and try to be happy and then something chance happens and it’s all gone. It’s because we don’t believe in a life after death.”

  “Not don’t. Can’t.”

  “Every time you go out and I’m not with you I think you may die. I think about dying every day. Every time I have you, I think this is one in the eye for death. You know, you’ve got a lot of money and the shops are going to shut in an hour. It’s sick, but you’ve got to spend. Does that make sense?”

  “Of course. The bomb.”

  She lay smoking.

  “It’s not the bomb. It’s us.”

  * * *

  She didn’t fall for the solitary heart; she had a nose for emotional blackmail. She thought it must be nice to be totally alone in the world, to have no family ties. When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends—using my favorite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world—she just laughed. “You like it,” she said. “You say you’re isolated, boyo, but you really think you’re different.” She broke my hurt silence by saying, too late, “You are different.”

  “And isolated.”

  She shrugged. “Marry someone. Marry me.”

  She said it as if she had suggested I try an aspirin for a headache. I kept my eyes on the road.

  “You’re going to marry Pete.”

  “And you wouldn’t marry me because I’m a whore and a colonial.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t use that word.”

  “And you wish I wouldn’t use that word.”

  Always we edged away from the brink of the future. We talked about a future, about living in a cottage, where I should write, about buying a jeep and crossing Australia. “When we’re in Alice Springs…” became a sort of joke—in never-never land.

  One day drifted and melted into another. I knew the affaire was like no other I had been through. Apart from anything else it was so much happier physically. Out of bed I felt I was teaching her, anglicizing her accent, polishing off her roughnesses, her provincialisms; in bed she did the teaching. We knew this reciprocity without being able, perhaps because we were both single children, to analyze it. We both had something to give and to gain… and at the same time a physical common ground, the same appetites, the same tastes, the same freedom from inhibition. She was teaching me other things, besides the art of love; but that is how I thought of it at the time.

  I remember one day when we were standing in one of the rooms at the Tate. Alison was leaning slightly against me, holding my hand, looking in her childish sweet-sucking way at a Renoir. I suddenly had a feeling that we were one body, one person, even there; that if she had disappeared it would have been as if I had lost half of myself. A terrible deathlike feeling, which anyone less cerebral and self-absorbed than I was then would have realized was simply love. I thought it was desire. I drove her straight home and tore her clothes off.

  * * *

  Another day, in Jermyn Street, we ran into Billy Whyte, an Old Etonian I had known quite well at Magdalen; he’d been one of the Hommes Révoltés. He was pleasant enough, not in the least snobbish—Etonians very seldom are—but he carried with him, perhaps in spit
e of himself, an unsloughable air of high caste, of constant contact with the nicest best people, of impeccable upper-class taste in facial expression, clothes, vocabulary. We went off to an oyster bar; he’d just heard the first Colchesters of the season were in. Alison said very little, but I was embarrassed by her, by her accent, by the difference between her and one or two debs who were sitting near us. She left us for a moment when Billy poured the last of the Muscadet.

  “Nice girl, dear boy.”

  “Oh…” I shrugged. “You know.”

  “Most attractive.”

  “Cheaper than central heating.”

  “I’m sure.”

  But I knew what he was thinking.

  Alison was very silent after we left him. We were driving up to Hampstead to see a film. I glanced at her sullen face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Sometimes you sound so mean, you upper-class Poms.”

  “I’m not upper-class. I’m middle-class.”

  “Upper, middle—God, who cares.”

  I drove some way before she spoke again.

  “You treated me as if I didn’t really belong to you.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “As if I’m a bloody abo.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “In case my pants fell down or something.”

  “It’s so difficult to explain.”

  “Not to me, sport. Not to me.”

  * * *

  One day she said, “I’ve got to go for my interview tomorrow.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  “Do you want me to go?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. You haven’t got to make up your mind.”

  “It’ll do me good if I get accepted. Just to know I’m accepted.”

  She changed the subject; and I could have refused to change the subject. But I didn’t.

  Then, the very next day, I too had a letter about an interview. Alison’s took place—she thought she had done well. Three days later she got a letter saying that she had been accepted for training, to start in October.

  I had my interview, with a board of urbane culture-organizers. She met me outside and we went and had an awkward meal, like two strangers, in an Italian restaurant. She had a gray, tired face, and her cheeks looked baggy. I asked her what she’d been doing while I was away.

  “Writing a letter.”

  “To them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Saying?”

  “What do you think I said?”

  “You accepted.”

  There was a difficult pause. I knew what she wanted me to say, but I couldn’t say it. I felt as a sleepwalker must feel when he wakes up at the end of the roof parapet. I wasn’t ready for marriage, for settling down. I wasn’t psychologically close enough to her; something I couldn’t define, obscure, monstrous, lay between us, and this obscure monstrous thing emanated from her, not from me.

  “Some of their flights go via Athens. If you’re in Greece we can meet. Maybe you’ll be in London. Anyway.”

  We began to plan how we would live if I didn’t get the job in Greece.

  * * *

  But I did. A letter came, saying my name had been selected to be forwarded to the School Board in Athens. This was “virtually a formality.” I should be expected in Greece about the beginning of October.

  I showed Alison the letter as soon as I had climbed the stairs back to the flat, and watched her read it. I was looking for regret, but I couldn’t see it. She kissed me.

  “I told you.”

  “I know.”

  “Let’s celebrate. Let’s go out in the country.”

  I let her carry me away. She wouldn’t take it seriously, and I was too much of a coward to stop and think why I was secretly hurt by her refusing to take it seriously. So we went out into the country, and when we came back we went to see a film and later went dancing in Soho; and still she wouldn’t take it seriously. But then, late, after love, we couldn’t sleep, and we had to take it seriously.

  “Alison, what am I going to do tomorrow?”

  “You’re going to accept.”

  “Do you want me to accept?”

  “Not all over again.”

  We were lying on our backs, and I could see her eyes were open. Somewhere down below little leaves in front of a lamppost cast nervous shadows across our ceiling.

  “If I say what I feel about you, will you…”

  “I know what you feel.”

  And it was there: an accusing silence.

  I reached out and touched her bare stomach. She pushed my hand away, but held it. “You feel, I feel, what’s the good. It’s what we feel. What you feel is what I feel. I’m a woman.”

  I was frightened; and calculated my answer.

  “Would you marry me if I asked you?”

  “You can’t say it like that.”

  “I’d marry you tomorrow if I thought you really needed me. Or wanted me.”

  “Oh Nicko, Nicko.” Rain lashed the windowpanes. She beat my hand on the bed between us. There was a long silence.

  “I’ve just got to get out of this country.”

  She didn’t answer; more silence, and then she spoke.

  “Pete’s coming back to London next week.”

  “What will he do?”

  “Don’t worry. He knows.”

  “How do you know he knows?”

  “I wrote to him.”

  “Has he answered?”

  She breathed out. “No strings.”

  “Do you want to go back to him?”

  She turned on her elbow and made me turn my head, so that our faces were very close together.

  “Ask me to marry you.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “No.” She turned away.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “To get it over. I’m going to be an air hostess, and you’re going to Greece. You’re free.”

  “And you’re free.”

  “If it makes you happier—I’m free.”

  The rain came in sudden great swathes across the treetops and hit the windows and the roof; like spring rain, out of season. The bedroom air seemed full of unspoken words, unformulated guilts, a vicious silence, like the moments before a bridge collapses. We lay side by side, untouching, effigies on a bed turned tomb; sickeningly afraid to say what we really thought. In the end she spoke, in a voice that tried to be normal, but sounded harsh.

  “I don’t want to hurt you and the more I… want you, the more I shall. And I don’t want you to hurt me and the more you don’t want me the more you will.” She got out of bed for a moment. When she came back she said, “We’ve decided?”

  “I suppose.”

  We said no more. Soon, too soon, I thought, she went to sleep.

  * * *

  In the morning she was determinedly gay. I telephoned the Council. I went to receive Miss Spencer-Haigh’s congratulations and briefings, and took her out for a second and—I prayed—last lunch.

  5

  What Alison was not to know—since I hardly realized it myself—was that I had been deceiving her with another woman during the latter part of September. The woman was Greece. Even if I had failed the board I should have gone there. I never studied Greek at school, and my knowledge of modern Greece began and ended with Byron’s death at Missolonghi. Yet it needed only the seed of the idea of Greece, that morning in the British Council. It was as if someone had hit on a brilliant solution when all seemed lost. Greece—why hadn’t I thought of it before? It sounded so good: “I’m going to Greece.” I knew no one—this was long before the new Medes, the tourists, invaded—who had been there. I got hold of all the books I could find on the country. It astounded me how little I knew about it. I read and read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.

  It seemed almost a secondary thing, by the time I left, that I wanted to escape from England. I thought of Alison only in terms of my going to
Greece. When I loved her, I thought of being there with her; when I didn’t, then I was there without her. She had no chance.

  I received a cable from the School Board confirming my appointment, and then by post a contract to sign and a courteous letter in atrocious English from my new headmaster. Miss Spencer-Haigh produced the name and address in Northumberland of a man who had been at the school the year before. He hadn’t been appointed by the British Council, so she could tell me nothing about him. I wrote a letter, but that was unanswered. Ten days remained before I was due to go.

  Things became very difficult with Alison. I had to give up the flat in Russell Square and we spent three frustrating days looking for somewhere for her to live. Eventually we found a large studio-room off Baker Street. The move, packing things, upset us both. I didn’t have to go until October 8th, but Alison started work on the 1st, and the need to get up early, to introduce order into our life, was too much for us. We had two dreadful rows. The first one she started, and stoked, and built up to a white-hot outpouring of contempt for men, and me in particular. I was a snob, a prig, a twopenny-halfpenny Don Juan—and so on. The next day—she had been icily mute at breakfast—when I went in the evening to meet her, she was not there. I waited an hour, then I went home. She wasn’t there, either. I telephoned: no air-hostess trainees had been kept late. I waited, getting angrier and angrier, until eleven o’clock, and then she came in. She went to the bathroom, took her coat off, put on the milk she always had before bed, and said not a word.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I’m not going to answer any questions.”

  She stood over the stove in the kitchen recess. She had insisted on a cheap room. I loathed the cooking-sleeping-everything in one room; the shared bathroom; the having to hiss and whisper.

  “I know where you’ve been.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “You’ve been with Pete.”