The Magus (19 page)

28

‘Buenos Ayres. I lived there for nearly four years, until the spring of 1919. I quarrelled with my uncle Anastasios, I gave English lessons, I taught the piano. And I felt perpetually in exile from Europe. My father was never to speak or write to me again, but after a while I began to hear from my mother.’

I glanced at Lily, but now, back in role, she was watching Conchis with a politely interested expression on her face. Lamplight became her, infinitely.

‘Only one thing of importance happened to me in the Argentine. A friend took me one summer on a tour of the Andean provinces. I learnt about the exploited conditions under which the peons and gauchos had to live. I urgently felt the need to sacrifice myself for the underprivileged. Various things we saw decided me to become a doctor. But the reality of my new career was harsh. The medical faculty at Buenos Ayres would not accept me, and I had to work day and night for a year to learn enough science to be enrolled.

‘But then the war ended. My father died soon after. Though he never forgave me, or my mother for having helped me, both into his world and out of it, he was sufficiently my father to let sleeping dogs lie. So far as I know my disappearance was never discovered by the authorities. My mother was left a sufficient income. The result of all this was that I returned to Europe and settled in Paris with her. We lived in a huge old flat facing the Pantheon, and I began to study medicine seriously. Among the medical students a group formed. We all regarded medicine as a religion, and we called ourselves the Society of Reason. We saw the doctors of the world uniting to form a scientific and ethical elite. We should be in every land and in every government, moral supermen who would eradicate all demagogy, all self-seeking politicians, reaction, chauvinism. We published a manifesto. We held a public meeting in a cinema at Neuilly. But the Communists got to hear of it. They called us Fascists and wrecked the cinema. We tried another meeting in another place. That was attended by a group who called themselves the Militia of Christian Youth – Catholic
ultras.
Their manners, if not their faces, were identical with those of the Communists. Which was what they termed us. So our grand scheme for utopianizing the world was settled in two scuffles. And heavy bills for damages. I was secretary of the Society of Reason. Nothing could have been less reasonable than my fellow-members when it came to paying their share of the bills. No doubt we deserved what we received. Any fool can invent a plan for a more reasonable world. In ten minutes. In five. But to expect people to live reasonably is like asking them to live on paregoric’ He turned to me. ‘Would you like to read our manifesto, Nicholas?’

‘Very much.’

‘I will go and get it. And fetch the brandy.’

And so, so soon, I was alone with Lily. But before I could phrase the right remark, the question that would show her I saw no reason why in Conchis’s absence she should maintain the pretending to believe, she stood up.

‘Shall we walk up and down?’

I walked beside her. She was only an inch or two shorter than myself, and she walked slowly, slimly, a shade selfconsciously, looking out to sea, avoiding my eyes, as if she now was shy. I looked round. Conchis was out of hearing.

‘Have you been here long?’

‘I have not been anywhere long.’

She gave me a quick look, softened by a little smile. We had gone round the other arm of the terrace, into the shadow cast by the corner of the bedroom wall.

‘An excellent return of service, Miss Montgomery.’

‘If you play tennis, I must play tennis back.’

‘Must?’

‘Maurice must have asked you not to question me.’

‘Oh come on. In front of him, okay. I mean, good God, we’re both English, aren’t we?’

‘That gives us the freedom to be rude to each other?’

‘To get to know each other.’

‘Perhaps we are not equally interested in … getting to know each other.’ She looked away into the night. I was nettled.

‘You do this thing very charmingly. But what exactly is the game?’

‘Please.’ Her voice was faintly sharp. ‘I really cannot stand this.’ I guessed why she had brought me round into the shadow. I couldn’t see much of her face.

‘Stand what?’

She turned and looked at me and said, in a quiet but fiercely precise voice, ‘Mr Urfe.’

I was put in my place.

She went and stood against the parapet at the far end of the terrace, looking towards the central ridge to the north. A breath of listless air from the sea washed behind us.

‘Would you shawl me, please?’

‘Would I?’

‘My wrap.’

I hesitated, then went back for the indigo wrap. Conchis was still indoors. I returned and put it round her shoulders. Without warning she reached her hand sideways and took mine and pressed it, as if to give me courage; and perhaps to make me identify her with the original, gentle Lily. She remained staring out across the clearing to the trees.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘I did not mean to be unkind.’

I mimicked her formal tone. ‘Can, may I, ask you … where you live here?’

She turned and leant against the edge of the parapet, so that we were facing opposite ways, and came to a decision.

‘Over there.’ She pointed with her fan.

‘That’s the sea. Or are you pointing at thin air?’

‘I assure you I live over there.’

An idea struck me. ‘On a yacht?’

‘On land.’

‘Curious. I’ve never seen your house.’

‘I expect you have the wrong kind of sight.’

I could just make out that she had a little smile at the corner of her lips. We were standing very close, the perfume around us.

‘I’m being teased.’

‘Perhaps you are teasing yourself.’

‘I hate being teased.’

She made a little mock inclination. She had a beautiful neck; the throat of a Nefertiti. The photo in Conchis’s room made her look heavy-chinned, but she wasn’t.

‘Then I shall continue to tease you.’

There was silence. Conchis was away far too long for the excuse he had given. Her eyes sought mine, a shade uncertainly, but I kept silent, and she looked away. Very gently, as to a wild animal, I reached out my hand and made her turn her head. She let my fingers rest on the cool skin of her cheek; but something in her now steady look, a declaration of inaccessibility, made me take my hand away. Yet our eyes lingered, and hers conveyed both an indication and a warning: Subtlety may win me, but force never will.

She turned to face the sea again.

‘Do you like Maurice?’

‘This is only the third time I’ve met him.’ She appeared to wait for me to go on. ‘I’m very grateful for his asking me over here. Especially –’

She cut short the compliment. ‘We all love him very much.’

‘Who is we?’

‘His other visitors and myself I could hear the inverted commas.

‘ “Visitor” seems an odd way of putting it.’

‘Maurice does not like “ghost”.’

I smiled. ‘Or “actress”?’

Her face betrayed not the least preparedness to concede, to give up her role.

‘We are all actors and actresses, Mr Urfe. You included.’

‘Of course. On the stage of the world.’

She smiled and looked down. ‘Be patient.’

‘I couldn’t imagine anyone I’d rather be more patient with. Or credulous about.’

She stared out over the sea. Her voice was suddenly lower, more sincere, out of role.

‘Not for me. For Maurice.’

‘And for Maurice.’

‘You will understand.’

‘Is that a promise?’

‘A prediction.’

There was a sound from the table. She glanced back, then into my eyes. She had the face I had first seen in the music-room door: both amused and conspiratorial, and now appealing as well.

‘Please pretend.’

‘Okay. But only in his presence.’

She took my arm and we moved back towards him. He gave us both his little interrogatory headshake.

‘Mr Urfe is very understanding.’

‘I am glad.’

‘All will be well.’

She smiled at me and sat down and remained thoughtfully for a while with her chin resting on her hand. Conchis had poured her a minute glass of
crème de menthe,
which she sipped. He pointed to an envelope he had put in my place.

‘The manifesto. It took me a long time to find. Read it later. There is an anonymous criticism of great force at the end.’

29

‘I still loved, at any rate practised, music. I had the big Pleyel harpsichord I use here in our Paris flat. One warm day in spring, it would have been in 1920, I was playing by chance with the windows open, when the bell rang. The maid came in to say that a gentleman had called and wished to speak to me. In fact, the gentleman was already behind the maid. He corrected her – he wanted to listen to me, not speak to me. He was such an extraordinary-looking man that I hardly noticed the extraordinariness of the intrusion. About sixty, extremely tall, faultlessly dressed, a gardenia in his buttonhole…’

I looked sharply at Conchis. He had turned and, as he seemed to like to, was looking out to sea as he spoke. Lily swiftly, discreetly raised her finger to her lips.

‘And also – at first sight – excessively morose. There was beneath the archducal dignity something deeply mournful about him. Like the actor Jouvet, but without his sarcasm. Later I was to discover that he was less miserable than he appeared. Almost without words he sat down in an armchair and listened to me play. And when I had finished, almost without words he picked up his hat and his amber-topped stick

I grinned. Lily saw my grin, but looked down and refused to share it; as if to ban it.

‘ … and presented me with his card and asked me to call on him the next week. The card told me that his name was Alphonse de Deukans. He was a count. I duly presented myself at his apartment. It was very large, furnished with the severest elegance. A manservant showed me into a
salon.
De Deukans rose to greet me. At once he took me, with the minimum of words, through to another room. And there were five or six harpsichords, old ones, splendid ones, all museum pieces, both as musical instruments and as decorative objects. He invited me to try them all, and then he played himself. Not as well as I could then. But very passably. Later he offered me a collation and we sat on Boulard chairs, gravely swallowing
marennes
and drinking a Moselle that he told me came from his own vineyard. So began the most remarkable friendship of my life.

‘I learnt very little about him for many months, although I saw him often. This was because he had never anything to say about himself or his past. And discouraged every kind of question. All that I could find out was that his family came from Belgium. That he was immensely rich. That he appeared, from choice, to have very few friends. No relations. And that he was, without being a homosexual, a misogynist. All his servants were men, and he never referred to women except with distaste.

‘De Deukans’s real life was lived not in Paris, but at his great chateau in eastern France. It was built by some peculating surintendant in the late seventeenth century, and set in a park far larger than this island. One saw the slate-blue turrets and white walls from many miles away. And I remember, on my first visit, some months after our first meeting, I was very intimidated. It was an October day, all the cornfields of the Champagne had long been cut. A bluish mist over everything, an autumn smoke. I arrived at Givray-le-Duc in the car that had been sent to fetch me, I was taken up a splendid staircase to my room, or rather my suite of rooms, and then I was invited to go out into the park to meet de Deukans. All his servants were like himself-silent, grave-looking men. There was never laughter around him. Or running feet. No noise, no excitement. But calm and order.

‘I followed the servant through a huge formal garden behind the chateau. Past box-hedges and statuary and over freshly raked gravel, and then down through an arboretum to a small lake. We came out at its edge and on a small point some hundred yards ahead I saw, over the still water and through the October leaves, an oriental tea-house. The servant bowed and left me to go on my way alone. The path led beside the lake, over a small stream. There was no wind. Mist, silence, a beautiful but rather melancholy calm.

‘The tea-house was approached over grass, so de Deukans could not hear me coming. He was seated on a mat staring out over the lake. A willow-covered islet. Ornamental geese that floated on the water as in a silk painting. Though his head was European, his clothes were Japanese. I shall never forget that moment. How shall I say it – that
mise en paysage.

‘His whole park was arranged to provide him with such decors, such ambiances. There was a little classical temple, a rotunda. An English garden, a Moorish one. But I always think of him sitting there on his
tatami
in a loose kimono. Greyish-blue, the colour of the mist. It was unnatural, of course. But all dandyism and eccentricity is more or less unnatural in a world dominated by the desperate struggle for economic survival.

‘Constantly, during that first visit, I was shocked, as a would-be socialist. And ravished, as an
homme sensuel.
Givray-le-Duc was nothing more nor less than a vast museum. There were countless galleries, of paintings, of porcelain, of
objets d’art
of all kinds. A famous library. A really unsurpassed collection of early keyboard instruments. Clavichords, spinets, virginals, lutes, guitars. One never knew what one would find. A room of Renaissance bronzes. A case of Breguets. A wall of magnificent Rouen and Nevers faience. An armoury. A cabinet of Greek and Roman coins. I could inventory all night, for he had devoted all his life to this collecting of collections. The Boulles and Rieseners alone were enough to furnish six smaller chateaux. I suppose only the Hertford Collection could have rivalled it in modern times. Indeed when the Hertford was split up, de Deukans had bought many of the best pieces in the Sackville legacy. Seligmann’s gave him first choice. He collected in order to collect, of course. Art had not then become a branch of the stock market.

‘On a later visit he took me to a locked gallery. In it he kept his company of automata – puppets, some almost human in size, that seemed to have stepped, or whirred, out of a Hoffman story. A man who conducted an invisible orchestra. Two soldiers who fought a duel. A prima donna from whose mouth tinkled an aria from
La Serva Padrona.
A girl who curtsied to a man who bowed, and then danced a pallid and ghostly minuet with him. But the chief piece was Mirabelle,
la Maitresse-Machine.
A naked woman, painted and silk-skinned, who when set in motion lay back in her faded four-poster bed, drew up her knees and then opened them together with her arms. As her human master lay on top of her, the arms closed and held him. But de Deukans cherished her most because she had a device that made it unlikely that she would ever cuckold her owner. Unless one moved a small lever at the back of her head, at a certain pressure her arms would clasp with vice-like strength. And then a stiletto on a strong spring struck upwards through the adulterer’s groin. This repulsive thing had been made in Italy in the early nineteenth century. For the Sultan of Turkey. When de Deukans demonstrated her “fidelity” he turned and said,
“C’est ce qui en elk est leplus vraisemblable.”
It is the most lifelike thing about her.’

I looked at Lily covertly. She was staring down at her hands.

‘He kept Madame Mirabelle behind locked doors. But in his private chapel he kept an even more – to my mind – obscene object. It was encased in a magnificent early-medieval reliquary. It looked much like a withered sea-cucumber. De Deukans called it, without any wish to be humorous, the Holy Member. He knew, of course, that a merely cartilaginous object could not possibly survive so long. There are at least sixteen other Holy Members in Europe. Mostly from mummies, and all equally discredited. But for de Deukans it was simply a collectable, and the religious or indeed human blasphemy it represented had no significance for him. This is true of all collecting. It extinguishes the moral instinct. The object finally possesses the possessor.

‘We never discussed religion or politics. He went to Mass. But only, I think, because the observance of ritual is a form of the cultivation of beauty. In some ways, perhaps because of the wealth that had always surrounded him, he was an extremely innocent man. Self-denial was incomprehensible to him, unless it formed part of some aesthetic regimen. I stood with him once and watched a line of peasants labouring a turnip-field. A Millet brought to life. And his only remark was, “It is beautiful that they are they and that we are we.” For him even the most painful social confrontations and contrasts, which would have pricked the conscience of even the vulgarest
nouveau riche,
were stingless. Without significance except as vignettes, as interesting discords, as pleasurable because vivid examples of the algedonic polarity of existence.

‘Altruistic behaviour – what he termed
“le diable en puritain”
– upset him deeply. For instance, since the age of eighteen I have refused to eat wild birds in any form at table. I would as soon eat human flesh as I would an ortolan, or a wild duck. This to de Deukans was distressing, like a false note in a music manuscript. He could not believe things had been written thus. And yet there I was, in black and white, refusing his
pâté d’alouettes
and his truffled woodcock.

‘But not all his life was to do with the dead. He had an observatory on the roof of his chateau, and a well-equipped biological laboratory. He never walked out in the park without carrying a small
etui
of test-tubes. To catch spiders. I had known him over a year before I discovered that this was more than another eccentricity. That he was in fact one of the most learned amateur arachnologists of his day. There is even a species named after him:
Theridion deukansii.
He was delighted that I also knew something of ornithology. And he encouraged me to specialize in what he jokingly called ornithosemantics – the meaning of bird-sound.

‘He was the most abnormal man I had ever met. And the politest. And the most distant. And certainly the most socially irresponsible. I was twenty-five – your age, Nicholas, which will perhaps tell you more than anything I can say how unable I was to judge him. It is, I think, the most difficult and irritating age of all. Both to be and to behold. One has the intelligence, one is in all ways treated as a grown man. But certain persons reduce one to adolescence, because only experience can understand and assimilate them. In fact de Deukans, by being as he was – certainly not by arguing – raised profound doubts in my philosophy. Doubts he was later to crystallize for me, as I will tell you, in five simple words.

‘I saw the faults in his way of life and at the same time found myself enchanted. That is, unable to act rationally. I have forgotten to tell you that he had manuscript after manuscript of unpublished music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To sit at one of the magnificent old harpsichords in his musicarium – a long rococo gallery in faded gold and pomona green, always in sunlight, as tranquil as an orchard – such experiences, such happiness, always give rise to the same problem: of the nature of evil. Why should such complete pleasure be evil? Why did I believe that de Deukans was evil? You will say, “Because children were starving while you played in your sunlight.” But are we never to have palaces, never to have refined tastes, complex pleasures, never to let the imagination fulfil itself? Even a Marxist world must have some destination, must develop into some higher state, which can only mean a higher pleasure and richer happiness for the human beings in it.

‘And so I began to comprehend the selfishness of this solitary man. More and more I came to see that his blindness was a pose and yet his pose was an innocence. That he was a man from a perfect world lost in a very imperfect one. And determined, with a monomania as tragic, if not quite so ludicrous, as Don Quixote’s, to maintain his perfection. But then one day – ‘

Conchis never finished his sentence. With an electrifying suddenness a horn clamoured out of the darkness to the east. I thought immediately of an English hunting-horn, but it was harsher, more archaic. Lily’s previously wafting fan was frozen, her eyes on Conchis. He was staring out to sea, as if the sound had turned him to stone. As I watched, his eyes closed, almost as if he was silently praying. But prayer was totally foreign to his face.

The horn broke the tense night again. Three notes, the middle the highest. They echoed faintly from some steep hillside inland, the primitive timbre seeming to wake the landscape and the night, to summon from an evolutionary sleep.

I said to Lily, ‘What is it?’

She held my eyes for a moment; with a strange hint of doubt, as if she half suspected me of knowing perfectly well what it was.

‘Apollo.’

‘Apollo!’

Again the horn was blown, but at a higher pitch, and closer, too close to the house now for me to see anything, because of the parapet, even if it had not been night. Conchis still sat with his oblivious face. Lily stood and held out a hand.

‘Come.’

I let her lead me to where we had stood before, at the eastern end of the terrace. She stared down into the trees, and I glanced at her profile.

‘Someone seems to be mixing metaphors.’

She couldn’t quite press the smile out of her mouth. My hand was gently squeezed.

‘Be good. Watch.’

The gravel, the clearing, the trees: I could see nothing unusual.

‘I just wish I had a programme. That’s all.’

‘How very dull of you, Mr Urfe.’

‘Nicholas. Please.’

But whatever answer she might have given to that was forestalled. From somewhere between the house and Maria’s cottage there came a beam of light. It was not very strong, from a small electric torch. In it, some sixty yards away on the edge of the pines, a figure stood like a marble statue. With a new shock I realized that it was that of an absolutely naked man. He was just near enough for me to make out the black pubic hair, the pale scape of his penis; tall, well-built, well cast to be Apollo. His eyes seemed exaggeratedly large, as if they had been made up. On his head there was a glint of gold, a crown of leaves; laurel-leaves. He was facing us, immobile, with his yard-long horn, a narrow crescent with a flared end, held slightly out from his waist in his right hand. It struck me after a few seconds that his skin was an unnatural white, almost phosphorescent in the weak beam, as if his body as well as his face had been painted.