The Magus (69 page)

Authors: John Fowles

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BOOK: The Magus

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If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse. I had forgotten the innumerability of the place, its ugliness, its termite density after the sparsities of the Aegean. It was like mud after diamonds, dank undergrowth after sunlit marble; and as the airline bus crawled on its way through that endless suburb that lies between Northolt and Kensington I wondered why anyone should, or could, ever return of his own free will to such a landscape, such a society, such a climate. Flatulent white clouds drifted listlessly in a grey-blue sky; and I could hear people saying ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’ But all those tired greens, greys, browns … they seemed to compress the movements of the Londoners we passed into a ubiquitous uniformity. It was something I had become too familiar with to notice in the Greeks – how each face there springs unique and sharp from its background. No Greek is like any other Greek; and every English face seemed, that day, like every other English face.

I got into a hotel near the air terminal about four o’clock and tried to decide what to do. Within ten minutes I picked up the phone and dialled Ann Taylor’s number. There was no answer. Half an hour later I tried again, and again there was no answer. I forced myself to read a magazine for an hour; then I failed a third time to get an answer. I found a taxi and drove round to Russell Square. I was intensely excited. Alison would be waiting for me, or if not there would be some clue. Something would happen. Without knowing why I went into a pub, had a Scotch, and waited another quarter of an hour.

At last I was walking up to the house. The street door was on the latch, as it always had been. There was no card against the third-floor bell. I climbed the stairs; stood outside the door and waited, listened, heard nothing, then knocked. No answer. I knocked again, and then again. Music, but it came from above. I tried Ann Taylor’s flat one last time, then went on up the stairs. I remembered that evening I had climbed them with Alison, taking her to have her bath. How many worlds had died since then? And yet Alison was somehow still there, so close. I decided she really was close; in the flat above. I did not know what would happen. Emotions exploded decisions.

I shut my eyes, counted ten, and knocked.

Footsteps.

A girl of nineteen or so opened the door; spectacles, rather fat, too much lipstick. I could see through another door into the sitting-room beyond her. There was a young man there and another girl, arrested in the act of demonstrating some dance; jazz, the room full of evening sunlight; three interrupted figures, still for an instant, like a contemporary Vermeer. I was unable to hide my disappointment. The girl at the door gave an encouraging smile.

I backed.

‘Sorry. Wrong flat.’ I began to go down the stairs. She called after me, who did I want, but I said, ‘It’s all right. Second floor.’ I was out of sight before she could put two and two together; my tan, my retreat, peculiar telephone calls from Athens.

I walked back to the pub, and later that evening I went to an Italian restaurant we had once been fond of; Alison had been fond of. It was still the same, popular with the poorer academic and artistic population of Bloomsbury: research graduates, out-of-work actors, publishers’ staff, mostly young, and my own kind. The clientele had not changed, but I had. I listened to the chatter around me; and was offput, and then alienated, by its insularity, its suddenly seen innocence. I looked round, to try to find someone I might hypothetically want to know better, become friendly with; and there was no one. It was the unneeded confirmation of my loss of Englishness; and it occurred to me that I must be feeling as Alison had so often felt: a mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless… speciesless.

I went and had one more look at the flat in Russell Square, but there was no light on the third floor. So I returned to the hotel, defeated. An old, old man.

The next morning I went round to the estate agents who looked after the house. They had a shabby string of green-painted rooms above a shop in Southampton Row. I recognized the adenoidal clerk who came to the counter to look after me as the one I had dealt with the previous year; he remembered me, and I soon extracted from him what little information he had to give. The flat had been assigned to Alison at the beginning of July – ten days or a fortnight after Parnassus. He had no idea whether Alison had been living there or not. He looked at a copy of the new lease. The assignee’s address was the same as the assigner’s.

‘Must have been sharing,’ said the clerk.

And that was that.

And what did I care? Why should I go on searching for her?

But I waited in all the evening after my visit to the estate agent, hoping for another message. The next day I moved to the Russell Hotel, so that I had only to stroll out of the entrance and look across the square to see the house, to wait for the windows on that black third floor to light. Four days passed, and no lights; no letters, no phone-calls, not the smallest sign.

I grew impatient and frustrated, hamstrung by this inexplicable lapse in the action. I thought perhaps they had lost me, they did not know where I was, and that worried me; and then it angered me that I was worried.

The need to see Alison drowned everything else. To see her. To twist the secret out of her; and other things I could not name. A week passed, a week wasted in cinemas, theatres, in lying on my hotel bed and staring at the ceiling, waiting for that implacably silent telephone beside me to ring. I nearly sent a cable to Bourani with my address; but pride stopped that.

At last I gave in. I could stand the hotel and Russell Square, that eternally empty flat, no longer. I saw a place advertised on a tobacconist’s board. It was a scruffy attic ‘flat’ over two floors of sewing-rooms at the north end of Charlotte Street, on the other side of the Tottenham Court Road. It was expensive, but there was a telephone and, though the landlady lived in the basement, she was an unmistakable Charlotte Street bohemian of the ‘thirties vintage: sluttish, battered, chain-smoking. She managed to let me know within the first five minutes I was in the house that Dylan Thomas had once been ‘a close friend’ – ‘God, the times I’ve put him to bed, poor sod.’ I didn’t believe her; ‘Dylan slept (or slept it off) here’ is to Charlotte Street rather what the similar claim about Queen Elizabeth used to be to the country inns of England. But I liked her – ‘My name’s Joan, everyone calls me Kemp.’ Her intellect, like her pottery and paintings, was a mess; but her heart was in the right place.

‘Okay,’ she said at the door, after I’d agreed to take the rooms. ‘As long as I have your money. Bring in who you want when you want. The last boy was a ponce. An absolute sweetie. The bloody fascists got him last week.’

‘Good Lord.’

She nodded. ‘Them.’ I looked round, and saw two young policemen standing on the corner.

I also bought an old M.G. The body was bad and the roof leaked, but the engine seemed to have a year or two of life left. I took Kemp out to Jack Straw’s Castle on a grand inaugural run. She drank like a trooper and talked like one, but in every other way she was what I wanted and what I needed: a warm heart and a compulsive gossip about herself, who accepted without suspicion my explanation of my joblessness; partly reconciled me, in her bitter-warm way, to London and being English; and – at least to begin with – stopped me from being, whenever I felt it, too morbidly abandoned and alone.

₇₀

A long August passed, and I had fits of acute depression, fits of torpid indifference. I was like a fish in stale water, stifled by the grey-ness of England. Just as I looked back, Adam after the fall, to the luminous landscapes, the salt and thyme of Phraxos, I looked back to the events of Bourani, which could not have happened, but which had happened, and found myself, at the end of some tired London afternoon, as unable to wish that they had not happened as I was to forgive Conchis for having given me the part he did. Slowly I came to realize that my dilemma was in fact a sort of
de facto
forgiveness, a condonation of what had been done to me; even though, still too sore to accept that something active had taken place, I thought of ‘done’ in a passive sense.

I thought in the same way of Lily. One day I nearly crashed, braking hard at the glimpse of a slim girl with long blonde hair walking down a side street. I swerved the car into the kerb and raced after her. Even before I saw the face I knew it was not Lily. But if I had rushed after the girl in the side street it was because I wanted to face Lily, to question her, to try to understand the ununderstandable; not because I longed for her. I could have longed for certain aspects of her, for certain phases – but it was that very phasality that made her impossible to love. So I could almost think of her, the light-phase her, as one thinks tenderly but historically of the moments of poetry in one’s life; and yet still hate her for her real, her black present being.

But I had to do something while I waited, while I absorbed the experience osmotically into my life. So throughout the latter half of August I pursued the trail of Conchis and Lily in England; and through them, of Alison.

It kept me, however tenuously and vicariously, in the masque; and it dulled my agonizing longing to see Alison. Agonizing because a new feeling had seeded and was growing inside me, a feeling I wanted to eradicate and couldn’t, not least because I knew the seed of it had been planted by Conchis and was germinating in this deliberate silence and absence he had surrounded me with; a feeling that haunted me day and night, that I despised, disproved, dismissed, and still it grew, as the embryo grows in the reluctant mother’s womb, sweeping her with rage, then in green moments melting her with … but I couldn’t say the word.

And for a time it lay buried under inquiries, conjectures, letters. I decided to ignore everything I had been told by Conchis and the girls as to what was false and what was true. In many things I merely wanted to discover some trace, some fingerprint: just to catch them out at their own skill at deception.

The newspaper cutting about Alison.
Different type from that of the
Holborn Gazette,
where the inquest report would have appeared.

Foulkes pamphlet.
Is in the British Museum Catalogue. Conchis’s are not.

Military history.
Letter from Major Arthur Lee-Jones.

Dear Mr Urfe,

I’m afraid your letter does ask, as you say yourself, for the impossible. The units engaged in the Neuve Chapelle set-piece were mostly regular ones. I think it most unlikely that any Princess Louise’s Kensington Regiment volunteers would have seen that engagement, even under the circumstances you suggest. But of course we have poor detailed records of that chaotic time, and I can’t hazard more than an opinion.

I can find no trace in the records of a captain called Montague. Usually one is on safer ground with officers. But perhaps he was seconded from one of the county regiments.

De Deukans.
No family of this name in the Almanach de Gotha or any other likely source I looked at. Givray-le-Duc was absent from even the largest French gazetteers. The spider
Theridion deukansii:
doesn’t exist, though there is a genus
Theridion.

Seidevarre.
Letter from Johan Fredriksen.

Dear Sir,

The mayor of Kirkenes has passed to me, who is the schoolmaster, your letter to answer. There is in Pasvikdal a place of the name Seidevarre and there was in that place many years from now a family of the name Nygaard. I am very sorry we do not know what is become with this family.

I am very pleased to help you.

I was even more pleased to have been helped. Conchis had once been there, something had happened there. It was not all fiction.

Lily’s mother.
I drove down to Cerne Abbas, not expecting to find Ansty Cottage – or anything else. I did not. I told the manageress at the little hotel where I had lunch that I’d once known two girls from Cerne Abbas – twins, very pretty, but I’d forgotten their surname. It left her deeply worried – she knew everyone in the village and couldn’t think who it could have been. The ‘headmaster’ at the primary school: in reality a headmistress. Obviously the letters had been invented on Phraxos.

Charles-Victor Bruneau.
Not in Grove. A man I spoke to at the Royal Academy of Music had never heard of him; or, needless to say, of Conchis.

Conchis’s costume at the ‘trial’.
On my way back from Cerne Abbas I stopped for dinner in Hungerford, and passed an antique shop on my way to the hotel. Propped up in the window were five old Tarot cards. On one of them was a man dressed exactly as Conchis had been; even to the same emblems on his cloak. Underneath were the words LE
SORCIER –
the sorcerer. The shop was shut, but I took its address and later they sold me the card by post; ‘a nice eighteenth-century card’.

It gave me a sharp shock when I first saw it – I looked round, as ifit had been planted there for me to notice; as if I were being watched.

The ‘psychologists’ at the trial.
I tried the Tavistock Clinic and the American Embassy. All the names totally unknown, though some of the institutes exist. Further research turned up nothing on Conchis.

Nevinson.
This was the pre-war master whose Oxford college was in a book in the school library. The Bursar’s Office at Balliol sent me an address in Japan. I wrote him a letter. Two weeks later I had a reply.

Faculty of English

Osaka University

Dear Mr Urfe,

Thank you for your letter. It came, as it were, from the distant past, and gave me quite a surprise! But I was delighted to hear that the school has survived the war, and I trust you have enjoyed your stay there as much as I did.

I had forgotten about Bourani. I remember the place now, however, and (very vaguely!) the owner. Did I have a violent argument with him once about Racine and predestination? I have an intuition, no more, that I did. But so much has flowed under the bridges since those days.

Other ‘victims’ before the war – alas, I can’t help you. The man before me I never met. I did know Geoffrey Sugden, who was there for three years after me. I never heard him refer especially to Bourani.

If you are ever in this part of the world, I should be delighted to talk over old times with you, and to offer you, if not an ouzo, at least a
sake pou napinete.

Yours sincerely,

DOUGLAS NEVINSON

Wimmel.
In late August, a piece of luck. One of my teeth began to hurt and Kemp sent me to her dentist to have it seen to. While I was in the waiting-room I picked up an old film magazine of the previous January. Halfway through I came on a picture of the false Wimmel. He was even dressed in Nazi uniform. Underneath there was a caption paragraph.

Ignaz Pruszynski, who plays the fiendish German Town Commandant in Poland’s much-praised film of the resistance,
Black Ordeal,
in real life played a very different role. He led a Polish underground group all through the Occupation, and was awarded the Polish equivalent of our own Victoria Cross.

Hypnotism.
I read a couple of books on this. Conchis had evidently learnt the technique professionally. Post-hypnotic suggestion, implanting commands that are carried out on a given signal after the subject has been woken from the trance state and is in all other ways returned to normal, was ‘perfectly feasible and frequently demonstrated’. But I thought back. At no point could I see that I had been unconsciously forced to behave any differently than I would have done consciously – than I had in fact behaved. No doubt I had been ‘pumped’ under hypnosis. But my own free will must have made further manipulation, except in very minor things, unnecessary.

Raising both arms above the head.
Conchis got this from ancient Egypt. It was the Ka sign, used by initiates ‘to gain possession of the cosmic forces of mystery’. In many tomb-paintings. It meant:
‘I am master of the spells. Strength is mine. I impart strength.’
Another Egyptian symbol was the ring-topped cross on the walls of the trial room. It was their ‘key of life’.

The wheel symbol.
‘The mandala, or wheel is a universal symbol of existence.’

The ribbon on my leg, the bare shoulder.
From masonic ritual, but believed to descend from the Eleusinian mysteries. Associated with initiation.

‘Maria.’
Probably really was a peasant, though an intelligent one. She spoke only two or three words of French to me; sat silent all through the trial, rather conspicuously out-of-place. Unlike the others,
she
may have been what she first seemed.

Lily’s bank.
I wrote another letter, and got back a reply from the manager of the real Barclay’s branch. His name was not P. J. Fearn; and the headed paper he wrote on was not like that I had received.

Her school.
Julie Holmes – unknown.

Mitford.
I wrote a card to the address in Northumberland I had had the year before and received a letter back from his mother. She said Alexander was now a courier, working in Spain. I got in touch with the travel firm he was working for, but they said he wouldn’t be back till September. I left a letter for him.

The paintings at Bourani.
I started with the Bonnards. The first book of reproductions of his work I opened had the picture of the girl drying by the window. I turned to the attributions list at the back. It was in the Los Angeles County Museum. The book had been printed in 1950. Later I ‘found’ the other Bonnard; at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Both had been copies. The Modigliani I never traced; but I suspect, remembering those curiously Conchis-like eyes, that it was not even a copy.

‘Evening Standard’
of January 8th, 1952. No sign of a photo of Lily and Rose, in any edition.

L’Astrée.
Did Conchis remember that I believed myself remotely connected with d’Urfé? The story of
L’Astrée
is: The shepherdess Astrée, hearing evil reports of the shepherd Celadon, banishes him from her presence. A war breaks out, and Astrée is taken prisoner. Celadon manages to rescue her, but she will not forgive him. He does not gain her hand until he has turned the lion and unicorns who devour unfaithful lovers into statues of stone.

Chaliapin.
Was at Covent Garden in June 1914, and in
Prince Igor.

‘You may he elect.’
When he said that, at our first strange meeting, he meant simply, ‘I’ve decided to use you.’ That was also the only sense in which, at the end, I could be elect. He meant, ‘We
have
used you.’

Lily and Rose.
Two twin sisters, both very pretty, gifted (though I came to doubt Lily’s classical education), must, if they had been at Oxford or Cambridge, have been the double Zuleika Dobsons of their years. I could not believe they had been at Oxford – since our years must have overlapped – so I tried the ‘other’ place. I searched through student magazines, tracked down stills from various college and university theatre productions, even braved one or two of the women’s college bursaries … and all in vain. Girton, her supposed college, had not a single likely candidate. London University proved a similar blank.

I also tried a few London theatrical agencies. Three times I was shown photographs of twin sisters; and was three times disappointed. I had no more luck at Berman’s and one or two other theatrical costumiers I went to. The Tavistock Repertory had not put on any production of
Lysistrata.
RADA
could not help. Indeed all I derived from the whole exercise – since my inquiries involved the concocting of various reasons for them – was a grudging retrospective admiration for the two girls’ own skill in improvising lies.

Of course there was one extra cunning in the ‘Julie Holmes’ invention. We always tend to believe people who have had the same experiences as ourselves. Her Cambridge equalled my Oxford, and soon.

Othello,
Act I, Scene III.