The Magus (15 page)

22

Someone was knocking at the door. Through the shadowy air of the open window, the burning sky. A fly crawled across the wall above the bed. I looked at my watch. It was half past ten. I went to the door, and heard the slap of Maria’s slippers going downstairs.

In the glaring light, the racket of cicadas, the events of the night seemed in some way fictional; as if I must have been slightly drugged. But I felt perfectly clear-headed. I dressed and shaved and went down to breakfast under the colonnade. The taciturn Maria appeared with coffee.

‘Okyrios?’I asked.

‘Ephage. Eine epano.’
Has eaten; is upstairs. Like the villagers, with foreigners she made no attempt to speak more comprehensibly, but uttered her usual fast slur of vowel-sounds.

I had my breakfast and carried the tray back along the side colonnade and down the steps to the open door of her cottage. The front room was fitted out as a kitchen. With its old calendars, its lurid cardboard ikons, its bunches of herbs and shallots and its blue-painted meat-safe hanging from the ceiling, it was like any other cottage living-kitchen on Phraxos. Only the utensils were rather more ambitious, and the stove larger. I went in and put the tray on the table.

Maria appeared out of the back room; I glimpsed a large brass bed, more ikons, photographs. A shadow of a smile creased her mouth; but it was circumstantial, not genuine. It would have been difficult enough in English to ask questions without appearing to be prying; in my Greek it was impossible. I hesitated a moment, then saw her face, as blank as the door behind her, and gave up.

I went through the passage between house and cottage to the vegetable garden. On the western side of the house a shuttered window corresponded to the door at the end of Conchis’s bedroom. It appeared as if there was something more than a cupboard there. Then I looked up at the north-facing back of the house, at my own room. It was easy to hide behind the rear wall of the cottage, but the ground was hard and bare; showed nothing. I strolled on into the arbour. The little Priapus threw up his arms at me, jeering his pagan smile at my English face.

No entry.

Ten minutes later I was down on the private beach. The water, blue and green glass, was for a moment cold, then deliciously cool; I swam out between the steep rocks to the open sea. After a hundred yards or so I could see behind me the whole cliffed extent of the headland, and the house. I could even see Conchis, who was sitting where we had sat on the terrace the night before, apparently reading. After a while he stood up, and I waved. He raised both his arms in his peculiar hieratic way, a way in which I knew now that there was something deliberately, not fortuitously, symbolic. The dark figure on the raised white terrace; legate of the sun facing the sun; the most ancient royal power. He appeared, wished to appear, to survey, to bless, to command;
dominus
and domaine. And once again I thought of Prospero; even if he had not said it first, I should have thought of it then. I dived, but the salt stung my eyes and I surfaced. Conchis had turned away – to talk with Ariel, who put records on; or with Caliban, who carried a bucket of rotting entrails; or perhaps with … but I turned on my back. It was ridiculous to build so much on the sound of quick footsteps, the merest glimpse of a glimpse of a white shape.

When I got back to the beach ten minutes later he was sitting on the baulk. As I came out of the water he stood and said, ‘We will take the boat and go to Petrocaravi.’ Petrocaravi, the ‘ship of stone’, was a deserted islet half a mile off the western tip of Phraxos. He was dressed in swimming-shorts and a garish red-and-white water-polo player’s cap, and in his hand he had the blue rubber flippers and a pair of underwater masks and schnorkels. I followed his brown old back over the hot stones.

‘Petrocaravi is very interesting underwater. You will see.’

‘I find Bourani very interesting above water.’ I had come up beside him. ‘I heard voices in the night.’

‘Voices?’ But he showed no surprise.

‘The record. I’ve never had an experience quite like it. An extraordinary idea.’ He didn’t answer, but stepped down into the boat and opened the engine housing. I untied the painter from its iron ring in the concrete, then squatted on the jetty and watched him fiddle inside the hatch. ‘I suppose you have speakers in the trees.’

‘I heard nothing.’

I teased the painter through my hand, and grinned. ‘But you know I heard something.’

He looked up at me. ‘Because you tell me so.’

‘You’re not saying, how extraordinary, voices, what voices. That would be the normal reaction, wouldn’t it?’ He gestured curtly to me to get aboard. I stepped down and sat on the thwart opposite to him. ‘I only wanted to thank you for organizing a unique experience forme.’

‘I organized nothing.’

‘I find it hard to believe that.’

We remained staring at each other. The red-and-white skull-cap above the monkey eyes gave him the air of a performing chimpanzee. And there stood the sun, the sea, the boat, so many unambiguous things, around us. I still smiled; but he wouldn’t smile back. It was as if I had committed
a. faux pas
by referring to the singing. He stooped to fit the starting-handle.

‘Here, let me do that.’ I took the handle. ‘The last thing I want to do is to offend you. I won’t mention it again.’

I bent to turn the handle. Suddenly his hand was on my shoulder. ‘I am not offended, Nicholas. I do not ask you to believe. All I ask you is to pretend to believe. It will be easier.’

It was strange. By that one gesture and a small shift in expression and tone of voice, he resolved the tension between us. I knew on the one hand that he was playing some kind of trick on me; a trick like the one with the loaded dice. On the other, I felt that he had after all taken a sort of liking for mc. I thought, as I heaved at the engine, if this is the price, I’ll seem his fool; but not be his fool.

We headed out of the cove. It was difficult to talk with the engine going, and I stared down through fifty or sixty feet of water to patches of pale rock starred black with sea-urchins. On Conchis’s left side were two puckered scars. They were both back and front, obviously bullet wounds; and there was another old wound high on his right arm. I guessed that they came from the execution during the second war. Sitting there steering he looked ascetic, Ghandi-like; but as we approached Pctrocaravi, he stood up, the tiller expertly against his dark thigh. Years of sunlight had tanned him to the same mahogany brown as the island fishermen.

The rocks were gigantic boulders of conglomerate, monstrous in their barren strangeness, much larger now we were close to them than I had ever realized from the island. We anchored about fifty yards away. He handed me a mask and schnorkel. At that time they were unobtainable in Greece, and I had never used them before.

I followed the slow, pausing thresh of his feet over a petrified landscape of immense blocks of stone, among which drifted and hovered shoals offish. There were flat fish, silvered, aldermanic; slim, darting fish; palindromic fish that peered foully out of crevices; minute poised fish of electric blue, fluttering red-and-black fish, slinking azure-and-green fish. He showed me an underwater grotto, a light-shafted nave of pale-blue shadows, where the large wrasse floated as if in a trance. On the far side of the islet the rocks plunged precipitously away into a mesmeric blind indigo. Conchis raised his head above the surface.

‘I am going back to fetch the boat. Stay here.’

I swam on. A shoal of several hundred golden-grey fish followed me. I turned, they turned. I swam on, they followed, truly Greek in their obsessive curiosity. Then I lay over a great slab of rock which warmed the water almost to bath-heat. The shadow of the boat fell across it. Conchis led me a little way to a deep fissure between two boulders, and there suspended a piece of white cloth on the end of a line. I hung like a bird in the water overhead, watching for the octopus he was trying to entice. Soon a sinuous tentacle slipped out and groped the bait, then other swift tentacles, and he began skilfully to coax the octopus up. I had tried this myself and knew it was not nearly as simple as the village boys made it seem. The octopus came reluctantly but inevitably, slow-whirling, flesh of drowned sailors, its suckered arms stretching, reaching, searching. Conchis suddenly gaffed it into the boat, slashed its sac with a knife, turned it inside out in a moment. I levered myself aboard.

‘I have caught a thousand in this place. Tonight another will move into that same hole. And let himself be caught as easily.’

‘Poor thing.’

‘You notice reality is not necessary. Even the octopus prefers the ideal.’ A piece of old white sheeting, from which he had torn his ‘bait’, lay beside him. I remembered it was Sunday morning; the time for sermons and parables. He looked up from the puddle of sepia.

‘Well, how do you like the world below?’

‘Fantastic. Like a dream.’

‘Like humanity. But in the vocabulary of millions of years ago.’ He threw the octopus under the thwart. ‘Do you think that has a life after death?’

I looked down at the viscid mess and up to meet his dry smile. The red-and-white skull-cap had tilted slightly. Now he looked like Picasso imitating Ghandi imitating a buccaneer. He let in the clutch lever and we moved forward. I thought of the Manic, of Neuve Chapelle; and shook my head. He nodded, and raised the white sheeting. His even teeth gleamed falsely, vividly in the intense sunlight. Stupidity is lethal, he implied; and look at me, I have survived.

23

We had lunch, a simple Greek meal of goat’s-milk cheese and green pepper salad with eggs, under the colonnade. The cicadas rasped in the surrounding pines, the heat hammered down outside the cool arches. I had, on the way back, made one more effort to penetrate the situation; by trying, too casually, to get him to talk about Leverrier. He had hesitated, then glanced at me with a gravity that did not quite hide the smile behind it.

‘Is this how they teach you at Oxford now? One reads last chapters first?’

And I had had to smile and look down. If his answer had not quenched my curiosity at all, it had at least jumped another pretence, and moved us on. In some obscure way, one I was to become very familiar with, it flattered me: I was too intelligent not to be already grasping the rules of the game we played. It was no good my knowing that old men have conned young ones like that ever since time began. I still fell for it, as one still falls for the oldest literary devices in the right hands and contexts.

All though the lunch we talked of the undersea world. For him it was like a gigantic acrostic, an alchemist’s shop where each object had a mysterious value, an inner history that had to be deduced, unravelled, guessed at. He made natural history sound and feel like something central and poetic; not an activity for Scoutmasters and a butt for
Punch
jokes.

The meal ended, and he stood up. He was going upstairs for his siesta. We would meet again at tea.

‘What will you do?’

I opened the old copy of
Time
magazine I had beside me. Tucked carefully inside lay his seventeenth-century pamphlet.

‘You have not read it yet?’ He seemed surprised.

‘I intend to now.’

‘Good. It is rare.’

He raised his hand and went in. I crossed the gravel and started idly off through the trees to the east. The ground rose slightly, then dipped; after a hundred yards or so a shallow outcrop of rocks hid the house. Before me lay a deep gulley choked with oleanders and thorny scrub, which descended precipitously down to the private beach. I sat back against a pine-stem and became lost in the pamphlet. It contained the posthumous confessions and letters and prayers of a Robert Foulkes, vicar of Stanton Lacy in Shropshire. Although a scholar, and married with two sons, in 1677 he had got a young girl with child, and then murdered the child; for which he was condemned to death.

He wrote the fine muscular pre-Dryden English of the mid-seventeenth century. He had ‘mounted to the top of impiety’, even though he had known that ‘the minister is the people’s Looking-glass’. ‘Crush the cockatrice,’ he groaned, from his death-cell. ‘I am dead in law’ – but of the girl he denied that he had ‘attempted to vitiate her at Nine years old’; for ‘upon the word of a dying man, both her Eyes did see, and her Hands did act in all that was done’.

The pamphlet was some forty pages long, and it took me half an hour to read. I skipped the prayers, but it was as Conchis had said, more real than any historical novel – more moving, more evocative, more human. I lay back and stared up through the intricate branches into the sky. It seemed strange, to have that old pamphlet by me, that tiny piece of a long-past England that had found its way to this Greek island, these pine trees, this pagan earth. I closed my eyes and watched the sheets of warm colour that came as I relaxed or increased the tension of the lids. Then I slept.

When I woke, I looked at my watch without raising my head. Half an hour had passed. After a few minutes more of dozing I sat up.

He was there, standing in the dark ink-green shadow under a dense carob tree seventy or eighty yards away on the other side of the gulley, at the same level as myself. I got to my feet, not knowing whether to call out, to applaud, to be frightened, to laugh, too astounded to do anything but stand and stare. The man was costumed completely in black, in a high-crowned hat, a cloak, a kind of skirted dress, black stockings. He had long hair, a square collar of white lace at the neck, and two white bands. Black shoes with pewter buckles. He stood there in the shadows, posed, a Rembrandt, disturbingly authentic and yet enormously out of place – a heavy, solemn man with a reddish face. Robert Foulkes.

I looked round, half expecting to see Conchis somewhere behind me. But there was no one. I looked back at the figure, which had not moved, which continued to stare at me from the shade through the sunlight over the gulley. And then another figure appeared from behind the carob. It was a white-faced young girl of fourteen or so, in a long dark-brown dress. I could make out a sort of close-fitting purple cap on the back of her head. Her hair was long. She came beside him, and she also stared at me. She was much shorter than he was, barely to his ribs. We must have stood, the three of us, staring at each other for nearly half a minute. Then I raised my arm, with a smile on my face. There was no response. I moved ten yards or so forward, out into the sunlight, as far as I could, to the edge of the gulley.

‘Good day,’ I called in Greek. ‘What are you doing?’ And then again:
‘Ti
kanete?’

But they made not the least reply. They stood and stared at me -the man with a vague anger, it seemed, the girl expressionlessly. A flaw of the sun-wind blew a brown banner, some part of the back of her dress, out sideways.

I thought, it’s Henry James. The old man’s discovered that the screw could take another turn. And then, his breathtaking impudence. I remembered the conversation about the novel. ‘
Words are for facts. Not
fiction.’

I looked round again, towards the house; Conchis must declare himself now. But he did not. There was myself, with an increasingly foolish smile on my face – and there were the two in their green shadow. The girl moved a little closer to the man, who put his hand ponderously, patriarchally, on her near shoulder. They seemed to be waiting for me to do something. Words were no use. I had to get close to them. I looked up the gulley. It was uncrossable for at least a hundred yards, but then my side appeared to slope more easily to its floor. Making a gesture of explanation, I started up the hill. I looked back again and again at the silent pair under the tree. They turned and watched me until a shoulder on their side of the small ravine hid them from view. I broke into a run.

The gulley was finally negotiable, though it was a tough scramble up the far side through some disagreeably sharp-thorned smilax. Once through that I was able to run again. The carob came into sight below. There was nothing there. In a few seconds – it had been perhaps a minute in all since I had lost sight of them – I was standing under the tree, on an unrevealing carpet of shrivelled carats. I looked to where I had slept. The small grey and red-edged squares of the pamphlet and
Time
lay on the pale carpet of needles. I went well beyond the carob until I came to strands of wire running through the trees, at the edge of the inland bluff, the eastern limit of Bourani. The three cottages lay innocently below in their little orchard of olives. In a kind of panic I walked back to the carob and along the east side of the gulley to the top of the cliff that overlooked the private beach. There was more scrub there, but not enough for anyone to hide, unless they lay flat. And I could not imagine that choleric-looking man lying down flat, in hiding.

Then from the house I heard the bell. It rang three times. I looked at my watch – teatime. The bell rang again: quick, quick, slow, and I realized it was sounding the syllables of my name.

I ought, I suppose, to have felt frightened. But I wasn’t. Apart from anything else I was too intrigued and too bewildered. Both the man and the whey-faced girl had looked remarkably English; and whatever nationality they really were, I knew they didn’t live on the island. So I had to presume that they had been specially brought; had been standing by, hiding somewhere, waiting for me to read the Foulkes pamphlet. I had made it easy by falling asleep, and at the edge of the gulley. But that had been pure chance. And how could Conchis have such people standing by? And where had they disappeared to?

For a few moments I had let my mind plunge into darkness, into a world where the experience of all my life was disproved and ghosts existed. But there was something far too unalloyedly physical about all these supposedly ‘psychic’ experiences. Besides, ‘apparitions’ obviously carry least conviction in bright daylight. It was almost as if I was intended to see that they were not really supernatural; and there was Conchis’s cryptic, doubt-sowing advice that it would be easier if I pretended to believe. Why easier? More sophisticated, more polite, perhaps; but ‘easier’ suggested that I had to pass through some ordeal.

I stood there in the trees, absolutely at a loss; and then smiled. I had somehow landed myself in the centre of an extraordinary old man’s fantasies. That was clear. Why he should hold them, why he should so strangely realize them, and above all, why he should have chosen me to be his solitary audience of one, remained a total mystery. But I knew I had become involved in something too uniquely bizarre to miss, or to spoil, through lack of patience or humour.

I recrosscd the gulley and picked up
Time
and the pamphlet. Then, as I looked back at the dark, inscrutable carob tree, I did feel a faint touch of fear. But it was a fear of the inexplicable, the unknown, not of the supernatural.

As I walked across the gravel to the colonnade, where I could see Conchis was already sitting, his back to me, I decided on a course of action – or rather, of reaction.

He turned. ‘A good siesta?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘You have read the pamphlet?’

‘You’re right. It is more fascinating than any historical novel.’ He kept a face impeccably proof to my ironic undertone. ‘Thank you very much.’ I put the pamphlet on the table.

Calmly, in my silence, he began to pour me tea.

He had already had his own and he went away to play the harpsichord for twenty minutes. As I listened to him, I thought. The incidents seemed designed to deceive all the senses. Last night’s had covered smell and hearing; this afternoon’s, and that glimpsed figure of yesterday, sight. Taste seemed irrelevant – but touch … how on earth could he expect me even to pretend to believe that what I might touch was ‘psychic’? And then what on earth – appropriately, on earth – had these tricks to do with ‘travelling to other worlds’ ? Only one thing was clear; his anxiety about how much I might have heard from Mitford and Leverrier was now explained. He had practised his strange illusionisms on them, and sworn them to secrecy.

When he came out he took me off to water his vegetables. The water had to be drawn up out of one of a battery of long-necked cisterns behind the cottage, and when we had done that and fed the plants we sat on a seat by the Priapus arbour, with the unusual smell, in summer Greece, of verdant wet earth all around us. He did his deep-breathing exercises; evidently, like so much else in his life, ritual; then smiled at me and jumped back twenty-four hours.

‘Now tell me about this girl’ It was a command, not a question; or a refusal to believe I could refuse again.

‘There’s nothing really to tell.’

‘She turned you down.’

‘No. Or not at the beginning. I turned her down.’

‘And now you wish … ?’

‘It’s all over. It’s all too late.’

‘You sound like Adonis. Have you been gored?’

There was a silence. I took the step; something that had nagged me ever since I had discovered he had studied medicine; and also to shock his mocking of my fatalism.

‘As a matter of fact I have.’ He looked sharply at me. ‘By syphilis. I managed to get it early this year in Athens.’ Still he observed me. ‘It’s all right. I think I’m cured.’

‘Who diagnosed it?’

‘The man in the village. Patarescu.’

‘Tell me the symptoms.’

‘The clinic in Athens confirmed his diagnosis.’

‘No doubt.’ His voice was dry; so dry that my mind leapt to what he hinted at. ‘Now tell me the symptoms.’

In the end he got them out of me; in every detail.

‘As I thought. You had soft sore.’

‘Soft sore?’

‘Chancroid.
Ulcus molle.
A very common disease in the Mediterranean. Unpleasant, but harmless. The best cure is frequent soap and water.’

‘Then why the hell…’

He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the ubiquitous Greek gesture for money, for money and corruption.

‘You have paid?’

‘Yes. For this special penicillin.’

‘You can do nothing.’

‘I can damn well sue the clinic’

‘You have no proof that you did not have syphilis.’

‘You mean Patarescu –’

‘I mean nothing. He acted with perfect medical correctness. A test is always advisable.’ It was almost as if he were on their side. He shrugged gently: thus the world goes.

‘He could have warned me.’

‘Perhaps he considered it more important to warn you against venery than venality.’

‘Christ.’

In me battled a flood of relief at being reprieved and anger at such vile deception. After a moment Conchis spoke again.

‘Even if it had been syphilis – why could you not return to this girl you love?’

‘Really – it’s too complicated.’

‘Then it is usual. Not unusual.’

Slowly, disconnectedly, prompted by him, I told him a bit about Alison; remembering his frankness the night before, produced some of my own. Once again I felt no real sympathy coming from him; simply his obsessive and inexplicable curiosity. I told him I had recently written a letter.

‘And if she does not answer?’ I shrugged. ‘She doesn’t.’

‘You think of her, you want to see her – you must write again.’ I smiled then, briefly, at his energy. ‘You are leaving it to hazard. We no more have to leave everything to hazard than we have to drown in the sea.’ He shook my shoulder. ‘Swim!’

‘It’s not the swimming. It’s knowing in which direction.’

‘Towards the girl. She sees through you, you say, she understands you. That is good.’

I was silent. A primrose-and-black butterfly, a swallowtail, hovered over the bougainvillaea round the Priapus arbour; found no honey, and glided away through the trees. I scuffed the gravel. ‘I suppose I don’t know what love is, really. If it isn’t all sex. And I don’t even really care a damn any more, anyway.’