The Magus (47 page)

The rocky lane dipped abruptly down between two cottages. The roof of the one on the right was below the wall of the house. At the bottom a cross alley took me back and round to the other side. There the ground fell away even more precipitously and I found myself looking up ten feet of vertical rock even before the wall foundation started. The house and its garden walls on this side continued the rock face, and I could see that in fact it was not a very big house, though still by village standards much too grandiose for a donkey-driver.

Two ground-floor windows, three upstairs, all shuttered. They were still in the last sunlight and must have given a fine view west over the village and the straits to the Argolian mainland. Was it a view Julie knew well? I felt like Blondel beneath Richard Cœur-de-Lion’s window; but not even able to pass messages by song. Down in a small square below I could see two or three women interestedly watching me. I waved, strolled on, as if my look upwards had been idle curiosity. I came to yet another cross alley, and climbed up it to my starting-point outside Agios Elias. The house was impregnable to passing eyes.

Later, down in front of the Hotel Philadelphia, I looked back. I could see over all the intervening roofs the church and the house to the right of it, the five windows staring out.

They seemed defiant, but blind.

51

Monday was a day of academic chores; catching up on the Sisyphean piles of marking that seemed always to roll down on my desk; finalizing – miserable word for a miserable prospect – the end-of-term examination papers; and trying all the time not to think about Julie.

I knew it was useless asking Demetriades to help me find out the names of the English masters at the school before the war. If he knew them he wouldn’t tell them; and very probably he genuinely did not know them. I went to the school bursar, but this time he could not help me; all the bursary records had gone with the wind of 1940. On Tuesday I tried the master who ran the school library. He went at once to a shelf and pulled down a bound volume of Founder’s Day programmes – one for each year before the war. These programmes were lavishly got up to impress visiting parents and in the back contained class-lists – as well as a list of ‘professors’. In ten minutes I had the names of the six who had taught between 1930 and 1939. But I was still stuck for their addresses.

The week ground slowly past. Each lunch-time I watched the village postman come in with letters and give them to the duty prefect, who then made a slow, slow tour of the tables. None came for me. I now expected no mercy from Conchis; but I found it hard to forgive Julie.

The first and most obvious possibility was that they had flown back to England; in which case I couldn’t believe she would not have written at once – at least to tell me. The second was that she had had to accept the cancellation of the weekend; but she could still have written to console me, to explain why. The third was that she was being held prisoner, or at any rate
incommunicado
to the extent that she could not post a letter to me. I couldn’t really believe that, though I still had angry moments when I thought of going to the police.

The days dragged on, redeemed only by one little piece of information that fell into my hands by chance. Looking through the books in the English bay in the library for a suitable ‘unseen’ for the exams, I took down a Conrad. There was a name on the flyleaf, D. P. R. Nevinson. I knew he had been at the school before the war. Underneath was written ‘Balliol College, 1930’. I started looking through the other books. Nevinson had left a good number; but there was no other address besides Balliol. The name W. A. Hughes, another prewar master’s, appeared on two poetry volume flyleafs, without address.

I left lunch early on the Thursday, asking a boy to bring me any letters that might be distributed later. I had come not to expect any. But about ten minutes afterwards, when I was already in pyjamas for the siesta, the boy knocked on my door. Two letters. One from London, a typewritten address, some educational publisher’s catalogue. But the other …

A Greek stamp. Indecipherable postmark. Neat italic handwriting. In English.

Monday, Siphnos

My dear sweet Nicholas

I know you must be terribly disappointed about the weekend, and I do hope you’re better now. Maurice gave me your letter. I’m so sorry for you. I used to be the same, catch every disease my wretched little brats brought into class. I couldn’t write earlier, we’ve been at sea and today is our first sight of a post-box. I must be quick – they’ve just told me the boat that takes the mail to Athens goes in half an hour. I’m scribbling this in a cafe by the harbour.

Maurice has actually been rather an angel, though still a mute one. He insists on waiting till you’re with us this coming weekend, if you’re better.
(Please
be better! Not just for that.) M. has actually been playing a tiny bit hurt as well because we, unreasonable creatures, still won’t promise to go on with his new plan until we know what it entails. We’ve really given up trying to get it out of him – it’s such a waste of time, and he positively enjoys being dark and enigmatic.

Which reminds me, I forgot, he
has
let slip that he wants to tell you the ‘last chapter’ (his words) of his life and also that you will be expecting it now … he said the last bit with a sort of smirk, as if something had happened we don’t know about. He’s terrible, he won’t stop playing games. Anyway, I hope you know what it’s all about.

I’m saving the best to the last. He’s sworn we shan’t be whisked away again any more, if we want to stay on the island in his village house we can … perhaps you won’t like me any more if you can see me every day. That’s June, she’s fed up because I’m at last getting some sort of tan.

It will be only two or three days more when you get this. He may play some last Maurician trick, so please pretend, remember you haven’t heard about the last chapter thing, let him have one last little bit of teasing y&u if he wants it. I think there is a tiny bit of jealousy. He keeps saying how lucky
you
are … and not listening when I say – you know what I say.

Nicholas.

Night water. You were sweet.

I must finish.

I love you.
YOUR JULIE

I read the letter twice, three times. Obviously the old devil was still up to his tricks. She had never seen my handwriting, it would have been simple to forge something – Demetriades could have got him specimens of my hand, if he wanted to be exact. Why he should still want to delay, still throw up these last obstacles, I couldn’t imagine. But her letter, those last five words, the thought of having her in the village – all that made everything else seem unimportant. I felt completely buoyant again, able to cope; as long as she was still in Greece, waiting for me, wanting me …

I was woken at four by the end-of-siesta bell that a prefect always came across and rang with vindictive violence in the wide stone corridor outside our rooms. There was the usual chorus of angry shouts from my colleagues. I lay on my elbow and read Julie’s letter again. Then I remembered the other one I had thrown on my desk and went yawning to open that.

Inside was a typewritten note and another, airmail, envelope slit open, but I hardly looked at them because two newspaper cuttings were pinned on to the top of the note. I had to read them first.

The first words.

The first words.

The whole thing had happened to me before, the same sensations, the same feeling that it could not be true and was true, of vertiginous shock and superficial calm. Coming out of the Randolph in Oxford with two or three other people, walking up to Carfax, a man under the tower selling the
Evening News.
Standing there, a silly girl saying ‘Look at Nicholas, he’s pretending he can read.’ And I looked up with the news of the Karachi air crash and the death of my parents in my face and said ‘My mother and father.’ As if I had just for the first time discovered that such people existed.

The top cutting was from some London local newspaper, from the bottom of a column. It said:

AIR HOSTESS SUICIDE

Australian air hostess Alison Kelly, 24, was yesterday found lying on her bed in the Russell Square flat they both share by her friend Ami Taylor, also Australian, when she returned from
a weekend in Stratford-on-Avon. She was rushed to the Middlesex Hospital but found to be dead on admission. Miss Taylor was treated for shock. Inquest next week.

The second cutting said:

UNHAPPY IN LOVE SO KILLS HERSELF

P.C. Henry Davis told the deputy Holborn coroner on Tuesday how on the evening of Sunday, June 29th, he found a young woman lying on her bed with an empty bottle of sleeping tablets by her side. He had been called by the dead girl’s flat-mate, Australian physiotherapist Ann Taylor, who found the deceased, Alison Kelly, air hostess, aged 24, on her return from a weekend at Stratford-on-Avon.

A verdict of suicide was recorded.

Miss Taylor said that although her friend had been subject to fits of depression and said she could not sleep properly she had had no reason to suppose the deceased was in a suicidal frame of mind. In answer to questions, Miss Taylor said, ‘My friend was recently depressed because of an unhappy love affair, but I thought she had got over it.’

Dr Behrens, the deceased’s doctor, told the coroner that Miss Kelly had led her to believe that it was her work which gave her insomnia. Asked by the coroner whether she normally prescribed such large quantities of tablets, Dr Behrens replied that she took into account the difficulty the deceased might have in getting to a chemist frequently. She had no reason to suspect suicide.

The coroner stated that two notes found by the police threw no light on the real motive of this tragic business.

The typewritten note was from Ann Taylor.

Dear Nicholas Urfe,

The enclosed cuttings will explain why I am writing. I am sorry, it will be a great shock, but I don’t know how else to break it. She was very depressed when she came back from Athens, but she wouldn’t talk about it, so I don’t know whose fault it was. She used to talk a lot about suicide at one time but we always thought it was a joke.

She left this envelope for you. The police opened it. There was no note inside. There was a note for me, but it said nothing – just apologies.

We are all heartbroken about it. I feel I am to blame. Now she is gone we realize what she was. I can’t understand any man not realizing what she really was underneath and not wanting to marry her. But I don’t understand men, I suppose.

Yours very sadly,

ANN TAYLOR

P.S. I don’t know if you want to write to her mother. The ashes are being sent home. Her address is – Mrs Mary Kelly, 19 Liverpool Avenue, Goulburn, N.S.W.

I looked at the airmail envelope. It had my name outside, in Alison’s handwriting. I tipped the contents out on the desk. A tangle of clumsily pressed flowers: two or three violets, some pinks. Two of the pinks were still woven together.

Three weeks.

To my horror I began to cry.

My tears did not last very long. I had no privacy. The bell for class rang, and Demetriades was tapping at my door. I brushed my eyes with the back of my wrist and went and opened it. I was still in pyjamas.

‘Eh! What are you doing? We are late.’

‘I don’t feel very well.’

‘You look strange, my dear fellow.’ He put on a look of concern. I turned away.

‘Just tell the first lot to revise for the exam. And tell the others to do the same.’

‘But–’

‘Leave me alone, will you?’

‘What shall I say?’

‘Anything.’ I shoved him out.

As soon as the sound of footsteps and voices had died down and I knew school had begun I pulled on my clothes and went out. I wanted to get away from the school, the village, from Bourani, from everything. I went along the north coast to a deserted cove and sat there on a stone and pulled out the cuttings again and re-read them. June 29th. One of the last things she must have done was to post my letter back unopened. Perhaps the last thing. For a moment I felt angry with the other girl; but I remembered her, her flat, prim face, and her kind eyes. She wrote stilted English, but she would never deliberately leave anyone in the lurch. That sort never did. And I knew those two sides of Alison – the hard practical side that misled one into believing she could get over anything; and the other apparently rather histrionic Alison that one could never quite take seriously. In a tragic way these two sides had finally combined: there would have been no fake suicides with her, no swallowing a few tablets when she knew someone would come in an hour’s time. But a weekend to die.

It was not only that I felt guilty of jettisoning Alison. I knew, with one of those secret knowledges that can exist between two people, that her suicide was a direct result of my having told her of my own attempt – I had told it with a curt meiosis that was meant to conceal depths; and she had called my bluff one final time.
I don’t think you know what sadness means.

I remembered those hysterical scenes in the Piraeus hotel; that much earlier ‘suicide note’ she had composed, to blackmail me, as I then thought, just before I left London. I thought of her on Parnassus; I thought of her in Russell Square; things she said, she did, she was. And a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. All those bitter home truths she had flung at me, right from the beginning … and still loved me; was so blind that she still loved me. One day she had said:
When you love me
(and she had not meant ‘make love to me’)
it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am
; and I took it as a chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and so give me a sense of responsibility towards her. In a way her death was the final act of blackmail; but the blackmailed should feel innocent, and I felt guilty. It was as if at this moment, when I most wanted to be clean, I had fallen into the deepest filth; most free for the future yet most chained to the past.

And Julie; she now became a total necessity.

Not only marriage with her, but confession
to
her. If she had been beside me then, I could have poured out everything, made a clean start. I needed desperately to throw myself on her mercy, to be forgiven by her. Her forgiveness was the only possible justification now. I was tired, tired, tired of deception; tired of being deceived; tired of deceiving others; and most tired of all of being self-tricked, of being endlessly at the mercy of my own loins; the craving for the best, that made the very worst of me.

Those flowers, those intolerable flowers.

My monstrous crime was Adam’s, the oldest and most vicious of all male selfishnesses: to have imposed the role I needed from Alison on her real self. Something far worse than
lèse-majesté. Lèse-humanité.
What had she said about that muleteer?
I felt two packets fond of him.

And one death fond of me.

When I got back that evening I wrote two letters, one to Ann Taylor, the other to Alison’s mother. I thanked Ann and true to my new resolve took as much blame as I could; to the mother (Goulburn, N.S.W. – I remembered Alison screwing up her face:
Goulburn, the first half’s all it’s fit for, the second’s what they ought to do with it),
to the mother, a difficult, because I didn’t know how much Alison had said about me, letter of condolence.

Before I went to bed I took out
England’s Helicon;
turned to Marlowe.

Come live with mee, and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove,

That Vallies, groves, hills and fieldes,

Woods or steepie mountaine yeeldes.

And wee will sit upon the Rocks,

Seeing the sheepheards feede theyr flocks,

By shallow Rivers, to whose falls

Melodious byrds sing Madrigalls.

And I will make thee beds of Roses,

And a thousand fragrant poesies,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle,

Imbroydred all with leaves of Mirtle …

⁵²

I had another letter from England on Saturday morning. There was a small black eagle on the flap: Barclay’s Bank.

Dear Mr Urfe,

Thank you for writing to me upon the recommendation of the Misses Holmes. I have pleasure in enclosing a form which I hope you will kindly fill in and return to me and also a small booklet with details of the special services we can offer overseas customers.

Yours truly,

P. J. FEARN

Manager

I looked up from reading it into the eyes of the boy who sat opposite me at table, and gave him a small smile; the unsuppressed smile of the bad poker-player.

Half an hour later I was climbing through the windless forest to the central ridge. The mountains were reduced to a pale insubstantiality by the heat, and the islands to the east rose and trembled shimmeringly over the sea, a strange optical illusion, like spinning tops. I came to where I could see down to the south; and my heart leapt. The yacht was there, like a reprieve. I moved along to a place where there was shade and a view down over Bourani; and sat there for half an hour, in limbo, with the death of Alison still dark inside me and the hope of Julie, Julie now confirmed as Julie, there below me in the sun. Gradually, those last two days, I had begun to absorb the fact of Alison’s death; that is, had begun to edge it out of the moral world into the aesthetic, where it was easier to live with.

By this sinister elision, this slipping from true remorse, the belief that the suffering we have precipitated ought to ennoble
us,
or at least make us less ignoble from then on, to disguised self-forgiveness, the belief that suffering in some way ennobles
life,
so that the precipitation of pain comes, by such a cockeyed algebra, to equal the ennoblement, or at any rate the enrichment, of life, by this characteristically twentieth-century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from
aqua
into
unda,
I dulled the pain of that accusing death; and hardened myself, to say nothing of it at Bourani. I was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked likely to be high.

Before I moved off I took out the headed Barclays letter and read it again. It had the effect of making me feel more indulgent towards Conchis than I had intended to be. I saw no objection now to a few small last dissimulations – on both sides.