The Magus Read online

  “All right. I’ve been with Pete.” She gave me a furious dark look. “So?”

  “You could have waited till Thursday.”

  “Why should I?”

  Then I lost my temper. I dragged up everything I could remember that might hurt her. She didn’t say anything, but undressed and got into bed, and lay with her face turned to the wall. She began to cry. In the silence I kept remembering, with intense relief, that I should soon be free of all this. It was not that I believed my own vicious accusations; but I still hated her for having made me make them. In the end I sat beside her and watched the tears trickle out of her swollen eyes.

  “I waited hours for you.”

  “I went to the cinema. I haven’t seen Pete.”

  “Why lie about it?”

  “Because you can’t trust me. As if I’d do that.”

  “This is such a lousy way to end.”

  “I could have killed myself tonight. If I’d had the courage. I’d have thrown myself under the train. I stood there and thought of doing it.”

  “I’ll get you a whisky.” I came back with it and gave it to her. “I wish to God you’d live with someone. Isn’t there another air hostess who’d—”

  “I’m never going to live with another woman again.”

  “Are you going back to Pete?”

  She gave me an angry look.

  “Are you trying to tell me I shouldn’t?”

  “No.”

  She sank back and stared at the wall.

  “I’d be back with him now… if I could stand the idea.” For the first time she gave a faint smile. The whisky was beginning to work. “It’s like those Hogarth pictures. Love a la mode. Five weeks later.”

  “Are we friends again?”

  “We can’t ever be friends again.”

  “If it hadn’t been you, I’d have walked out this evening.”

  “If it hadn’t been you I wouldn’t have come back.”

  She held out her glass for more whisky. I kissed her wrist, and went and got the bottle.

  “You know what I thought today?” She said it across the room.

  “No.”

  “If I killed myself, you’d be pleased. You’d be able to go round saying, she killed herself because of me. I think that would always keep me from suicide. Not letting some lousy slit like you get the credit.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Then I thought I could do it if I wrote a note first explaining why I did it.” She eyed me, still hostile. “Look in my handbag. The shorthand pad.” I got it out. “Look at the back.”

  There were two pages scrawled in her big handwriting.

  “When did you write this?”

  “Read it.”

  I don’t want to live any more, it said. I spend most of my life not wanting to live. The only place I am happy is here where we’re being taught, and I have to think of something else, or reading books, or in the cinema. Or in bed. I’m only happy when I forget I exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist. I can’t remember having been happy for two or three years. Since the abortion. All I can remember is forcing myself sometimes to look happy so if I catch sight of my face in the mirror I might kid myself for a moment I really am happy.

  There were two more sentences heavily crossed out. I looked up into her gray eyes, still watching me.

  “You can’t mean this.”

  “I wrote it today in coffee-time. If I’d known how to quietly kill myself in the canteen I’d have done it.”

  “It’s… well, hysterical.”

  “I feel hysterical.” It was almost a shout.

  “And histrionic. You wrote it for me to see.”

  There was a long pause. She kept her eyes shut.

  “Not just for you to see.”

  And then she cried again, but this time, in my arms. I tried to reason with her. I made promises; I would postpone the journey to Greece, I would turn down the job—a hundred things that I didn’t mean and she knew I didn’t mean, but finally took as a placebo.

  In the morning I persuaded her to ring up and say that she wasn’t well, and we spent the day out in the country.

  * * *

  The next morning, my last but two, came a postcard with a Northumberland postmark. It was from Mitford, the man who had been on Phraxos, to say that he would be in London for a few days, if I wanted to meet him.

  I rang him up on the Wednesday at the Army and Navy Club and asked him out to lunch. He was two or three years older than myself, tanned, with blue staring eyes in a narrow head. He had a dark young-officer moustache, which he kept on touching, and he wore a dark-blue blazer, with a regimental tie. He reeked mufti; and almost at once we started a guerrilla war of prestige and anti-prestige. He had been parachuted into Greece during the German Occupation, and he was very glib with his Xan’s and his Paddy’s and the Christian names of all the other well-known condottieri of the time. He had tried hard to acquire the triune personality of the philhellefle in fashion—gentleman, scholar, thug—but he spoke with a secondhand accent and the clipped, sparse prepsehoolisms of a Viscount Montgomery. He was dogmatic, unbrooking, lost off the battlefield. I managed to keep my end up, over pink gins; I told him my war had consisted of two years’ ardent longing for demobilization. It was absurd. I wanted information from him, not antipathy; so in the end I made an effort, confessed I was a Regular Army officer’s son and asked him what the island looked like.

  He nodded at the food-stand on the bar. “There’s the island.” He pointed with his cigarette. “That’s what the locals call it.” He said some word in Greek. “The Pasty. Shape, old boy. Central ridge. Here’s your school and your village in this corner. All the rest of this north side and the entire south side deserted. That’s the lie of the land.”

  “The school?”

  “Best in Greece, actually.”

  “Discipline?” He stiffened his hand karate fashion.

  “Teaching problems?”

  “Usual stuff.” He preened his moustache in the mirror behind the bar; mentioned the names of two or three books.

  I asked him about life outside the school.

  “Isn’t any. Island’s damn beautiful, if you like that sort of thing. Birds and the bees, all that caper.”

  “There’s a village, isn’t there?”

  He smiled grimly. “Old boy, your Greek village isn’t like an English village. Masters’ wives. Half a dozen officials. Odd pater and mater on a visit.” He raised his neck, as if his shirt collar was too tight. It was a tic; made him feel authoritative. “A few villas. But they’re all boarded up for ten months of the year.”

  “You’re not exactly selling the place to me.”

  “It’s remote. Let’s face it, bloody remote. And you’d find the people in the villas pretty damn dull, I can tell you. There’s one that you might say isn’t, but I don’t suppose you’ll meet him.”

  “Oh?”

  “Actually, we had a row and I told him pretty effing quick what I thought of him.”

  “What was it all about?”

  “Bastard collaborated during the war. That was really at the root of it.” He exhaled smoke. “No—you’ll have to put up with the other beaks if you want chat.”

  “They speak English?”

  “Most of ‘em speak Frog. There’s the Greek chap who teaches English with you. Cocky little bastard. Gave him a black eye one day.”

  “You’ve really prepared the ground for me.”

  He laughed. “Got to keep ‘em down, you know.” He felt his mask had slipped a little. “Your peasant, especially your Cretan peasant, salt of the earth. Wonderful chaps. Believe me. I know.”

  I asked him why he’d left. He became incoherent.

  “Writing a book, actually. Wartime experiences and all that. See my publisher.”

  There was something forlorn about him; I could imagine him briskly dashing about like a destructive Boy Scout, blowing up bridges and wearing picturesque offbeat uniforms; but he had
to live in this dull new welfare world, like a stranded archosaur. He went hurriedly on.

  “You’ll piss blood for England. It’ll be worse for you. With no Greek. And you’ll drink. Everyone does. You have to.” He talked about retsina and aretsinato, raki and ouzo—and then about women. “The girls in Athens are strictly O.O.B. Unless you want the pox.”

  “No talent on the island?”

  “Nix, old boy. Women are about the ugliest in the Aegean. And anyway—village honor. Makes that caper highly dangerous. Shouldn’t advise it. Discovered that somewhere else once.” He gave me a curt grin, with the appropriate hooded look in his eyes; T. E. Lawrence run totally to seed.

  I drove him back towards his club. It was a bronchial mid-afternoon, already darkening, the people, the traffic, everything fish-gray. I asked him why he hadn’t stayed in the Army.

  “Too damn orthodox, old boy. Specially in peacetime.”

  I guessed he had been rejected for a permanent commission; there was something obscurely wild and unstable about him under the officer’s-mess mannerisms.

  We came to where he wanted to be dropped off.

  “Think I’ll do?”

  His look was doubtful. “Treat ‘em tough. It’s the only way. Never let ‘em get you down. They did the chap before me, you know. Never met him, but apparently he went bonkers. Couldn’t control the boys.”

  He got out of the car.

  “Well, all the best, old man.” He grinned. “And listen.” He had his hand on the door-handle. “Beware of the waiting room.”

  He closed the door at once, as if he had rehearsed that moment. I opened it quickly and leaned out to call after him. “The what?”

  He turned, but only to give a sharp wave. The Trafalgar Square crowd swallowed him up. I couldn’t get the smile on his face out of my mind. It secreted an omission; something he’d saved up, a mysterious last word. Waiting room, waiting room, waiting room; it went round in my head all that evening.

  6

  I picked up Alison and we went to the garage that was going to sell the car for me. I’d offered it to her some time before, but she had refused.

  “If I had it I’d always think of you.”

  “Then have it.”

  “I don’t want to think of you. And I couldn’t stand anyone else sitting where you are.”

  “Will you take whatever I get for it? It won’t be much.”

  “My wages?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  But I knew she wanted a scooter. I could leave a check with Towards a scooter on a card, and I thought she would take that, when I had gone.

  It was curious how quiet that last evening was; as if I had already left, and we were two ghosts talking to each other. We arranged what we should do in the morning. She didn’t want to come and see me off at Victoria; we would have breakfast as usual, she would go, it was cleanest and simplest that way. We arranged our future. As soon as she could she would try to get herself to Athens. If that was impossible, I might fly back to England at Christmas. We might meet halfway somewhere—Rome, Germany.

  “Alice Springs,” she said.

  In the night we lay awake, knowing each other awake, yet afraid to talk. I felt her hand feel out for mine. We lay for a while without talking. Then she spoke.

  “If I said I’d wait?” I was silent. “I think I could wait. That’s what I mean.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re always saying ‘I know.’ But it doesn’t answer anything.”

  “I know.” She pinched my hand. “Suppose I say, yes, wait, in a year’s time I shall know. All the time you’ll be waiting, waiting.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “But it’s mad. It’s like putting a girl in a convent till you’re ready to marry her. And then deciding you don’t want to marry her. We have to be free. We haven’t got a choice.”

  “Don’t get upset. Please don’t get upset.”

  “We’ve got to see how things go.”

  There was a silence.

  “I was thinking of coming back here tomorrow night. That’s all.”

  “I’ll write. Every day.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a sort of test, really. We’ll see how much we miss each other.”

  “I know what it’s like when people go away. It’s agony for a week, then painful for a week, then you begin to forget, and then it seems as if it never happened, it happened to someone else, and you start shrugging. You say, dingo it’s life, that’s the way things are. Stupid things like that. As if you haven’t really lost something forever.”

  “I shan’t forget. I shan’t ever forget.”

  “You will. And I will.”

  “We’ve got to go on living. However sad it is.”

  After a long time she said, “I don’t think you know what sadness is.”

  * * *

  We overslept in the morning. I had deliberately set the alarm late, to make a rush, not to leave time for tears. Alison ate her breakfast standing up. We talked about absurd things: cutting the milk order, where I would be at lunchtime, where a library ticket I had lost might be. And then she put down her coffee-cup and we were standing at the door. I saw her face, as if it was still not too late, all a bad dream, her gray eyes searching mine, her small puffy cheeks. There were tears forming in her eyes, and she opened her mouth to say something. But then she leant forward, desperately, clumsily, kissed me so swiftly that I hardly felt her mouth, and was gone. Her camel-hair coat disappeared down the stairs. She didn’t look back. I went to the window, and saw her walking fast across the street, the pale coat, the straw-colored hair almost the same color as the coat, a movement of her hand to her handbag, her blowing her nose; not once did she look back. She broke into a sort of run. I opened the window and leant out and watched until she disappeared around the corner at the end of the street into Marylebone Road. And not even then, at the very end, did she look back.

  I turned to the room, washed up the breakfast things, made the bed; then I sat at the table and wrote out a check for fifty pounds, and a little note.

  Alison darling, please believe that if it was to be anyone, it would have been you; that I’ve really been far sadder than I could show, if we were not both to go mad. Please wear the earrings. Please take this money and buy a scooter and go where we used to go—or do what you want with it. Please look after yourself. Oh God, if only I was worth waiting for… Nicholas.

  * * *

  It was supposed to sound spontaneous, but I had been composing it on and off for days. I put the check and the note in an envelope, and set it on the mantelpiece with the little box containing the pair of jet earrings we had seen in a closed antique-shop one day. Then I shaved, and went out to get a taxi.

  The thing I felt most clearly, when the first corner was turned, was that I had escaped. Obscurer, but no less strong, was the feeling that she loved me more than I loved her, and that consequently I had in some indefinable way won. So on top of the excitement of the voyage into the unknown, the taking wing again, I had an agreeable feeling of emotional triumph. A dry feeling; but I liked things dry. I went towards Victoria as a hungry man goes towards a good dinner after a couple of glasses of Manzanilla. I began to sing, and it was not a brave attempt to hide my grief but a revoltingly unclouded desire to sing.

  7

  Five days later I was standing on Hymettus, looking down over the great complex of Athens-Piraeus, cities and suburbs, houses split like a million dice over the Attic plain. South stretched the pure blue late-summer sea, pale pumice-colored islands, and beyond them the serene mountains of the Peloponnesus stood away over the horizon in a magnificent arrested flow of land and water. Serene, superb, majestic: I tried for adjectives less used, but anything else seemed slick and underweight. I could see for eighty miles, and all pure, all noble, luminous, immense, all as it always had been.

  It was like a journey into space. I was standing on Mars, knee-deep
in thyme, under a sky that seemed never to have known dust or cloud. I looked down at my pale London hands. Even they seemed changed, nauseatingly alien, things I should long ago have disowned.

  When that ultimate Mediterranean light fell on the world around me, I could see it was supremely beautiful; but when it touched me, I felt it was hostile. It seemed to corrode, not cleanse. It was like being at the beginning of an interrogation under arc lights; already I could see the table with straps through the open doorway, already my old self began to know that it wouldn’t be able to hold out. It was partly the terror, the stripping-to-essentials, of love; because I fell head over heels, totally and forever in love with the Greek landscape from the moment I arrived. But with the love came a contradictory, almost irritating, feeling of impotence and inferiority, as if Greece were a woman so sensually provocative that I must fall physically and desperately in love with her, and at the same time so calmly aristocratic that I should never be able to approach her.

  None of the books I had read explained this sinister-fascinating, this Circe-like quality of Greece; the quality that makes it unique. In England we live in a very muted, calm, domesticated relationship with what remains of our natural landscape and its soft northern light; in Greece landscape and light are so beautiful, so all-present, so intense, so wild, that the relationship is immediately love-hatred, one of passion. It took me many months to understand this, and many years to accept it.

  Later that day I was standing at the window of a room in the luxury hotel to which the bored young man who received me at the British Council had directed me. I had just written a letter to Alison, but already she seemed far away, not in distance, not in time, but in some dimension for which there is no name. Reality, perhaps. I looked down over Constitution Square, the central meeting-place of Athens, over knots of strolling people, white shirts, dark glasses, bare brown arms. A sibilant murmur rose from the crowds sitting at the café tables. It was as hot as a hot English July day, and the sky was still perfectly clear. By craning out and looking east I could see Hymettus, where I had stood that morning, its whole sunset-facing slope an intense soft violet-pink, like a cyclamen. In the other direction, over the clutter of roofs, lay the massive black silhouette of the Acropolis. It was too real, too exactly as imagined, to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.