The Magus (74 page)

75

She was ten minutes late; came quickly, a polite small torment of apology on her face, and straight to where I had been standing next to the postcard counter.

‘I’m so sorry. The taxi crawled.’

I shook her outstretched hand. For a woman half a century old she was impressively good-looking; and she was dressed with an easy flair that made most of the dull afternoon visitors to the Victoria and Albert around us look even drabber than they really were; defiantly bareheaded, and in a grey-white Chanel suit that set off her tan and her clear eyes.

‘It’s such a mad place to meet. Do you mind?’

‘Not in the least.’

‘I bought an eighteenth-century plate the other day. They’re so good at identifying here. It won’t take a moment.’

She evidently knew the museum well and led the way to the lifts. We had to wait. She smiled at me; the family smile; soliciting, I suspected, what I was still not prepared to give. Determined to tread delicately between her approval and my own dignity, I had a dozen things ready to say, but her breathless arrival, the sudden feeling I had that I was being fitted, inconveniently, into a busy day, made them all seem wrong.

I said, ‘I saw John Briggs on Tuesday.’

‘How interesting. I haven’t met him.’ We might have been talking about the new curate. The lift came, and we stepped inside.

‘I told him everything I knew. All about Bourani and what to expect.’

‘We thought you would. That’s why we sent him to you.’

We were both smiling, faintly; a cramped silence.

‘But I might have.’

‘Yes.’ The lift stopped. We emerged into a gallery of furniture. ‘Yes. You might.’

‘Perhaps he was just a test.’

‘A test wasn’t necessary.’

‘You’re very sure.’

She gave me that same wide-eyed look she had had when she handed me the copy of Nevinson’s letter. At the end of the gallery we came to a door:
Department of Ceramics.
She pressed the bell beside it.

I said, ‘I think we’ve got off on the wrong foot.’

She looked down.

‘Well, yes. Shall we try again in a minute? If you wouldn’t mind waiting?’

The door opened and she was let inside. It was all too rushed, too broken, she gave me no chance, though her last quick look back before the door closed seemed apologetic; almost as if she was afraid I might run away.

Two minutes later she came back.

‘Any luck?’

‘Yes, it’s what I hoped it was. Bow.’

‘You don’t trust your intuition in everything, then.’

She gave me an amused look. ‘If there was a Department of Young Men … ‘

‘And then keep me labelled on a shelf?’

She smiled again, and glanced at the hall behind me. ‘I don’t really like museums. And especially those of past attitudes.’ She moved. ‘They say there’s a similar plate on display. Just through here.’

We went into a long deserted gallery of china. I began to suspect she had rehearsed this scene, since she went straight to one of the wall-cases. She took the plate out of her basket and held it up, walking slowly along until behind a group of cups and jugs, an almost identical blue-and-white plate appeared. I went beside her.

‘That’s it.’

She compared them; wrapped her own loosely in its tissue paper again, and then, taking me completely by surprise, presented it.

‘For you.’

‘But–’

‘Please.’ She challenged my almost offended face. ‘I bought it with Alison.’ She corrected herself. ‘Alison was with me when I bought it.’

It was pushed gently into my hands. At a loss, I unwrapped it, and stared down at a naively drawn Chinaman and his wife, their two children between them, eternal ceramic fossils, in the centre. For some reason I thought of peasants travelling steerage, the swell, the night wind.

‘I think you should get used to handling fragile objects. And ones much more valuable than that.’

I still stared down at the inky-blue figures.

‘That’s really why I asked to meet you.’

Our eyes met; and for the first time I had a sense of not just being assessed.

‘Shall we go and have our tea?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘why you really asked to meet me.’ We had found a table in the corner, and been served. ‘Alison.’

‘I did tell you.’ She picked up the tea-pot. ‘It depends on her.’ ‘And on you.’

‘No. Not in the least on me.’ ‘Is she in London?’

‘I have promised her not to tell you where she is.’

‘Look, Mrs de Seitas, I think—’ but I swallowed what I was going to say. I watched her pouring the tea; not otherwise helping me. ‘What the hell does she want? What am I supposed to do now?’

‘Is that too strong?’ I shook my head impatiently at the cup she held out. She poured some milk into her own cup, passed me the jug. She had a small smile. ‘I never take anger at face value.’

I wanted to shake that off as I had wanted to shake off her hand the week before; but I knew that behind the implicit condescension it was a valid statement of the difference between our two experiences of life. There was something discreetly maternal in it, a reminder to me that if I rebelled against her judgment, I rebelled against my own immaturity—if against her urbanity, against my own lack of it. I looked down.

‘It’s simply that I’m not prepared to wait much longer.’

‘Then she will be well rid of you.’

I drank some of the tea. She began calmly to spread honey over her toast.

I said, ‘My name is Nicholas.’ Her hands were momentarily arrested, then she went on spreading the honey … in more senses than one, perhaps. ‘Is that the right votive offering?’

‘If it is made sincerely.’

‘As sincerely as your offer of help the other day.’

‘Did you go to Somerset House?’

‘Yes.’

She put down her knife, faced me.

‘Wait as long as Alison makes you wait. I do not think it will be very long. But I can’t do anything to bring her to you. Now it is simply between you and her. I hope she will forgive you. But you must not be certain that she will. You still have to gain her back.’

‘There’s gaining back to be done on both sides.’

‘Perhaps. That is for the two of you to settle.’ She surveyed the sliver of toast in her hand a moment, then smiled up. ‘The godgame is over.’

‘The what?’

‘The godgame.’ For a moment there was something both faintly mischievous and sardonic in her eyes. ‘Because there is no God, and it is not a game.’

She began to eat her toast, and I glanced past her at the busy, banal tea-room. The discreet chink of cutlery on china, the murmur of middle-class voices; sounds as commonplace as sparrows’ chirruping.

‘That’s what you call it?’

‘A kind of nickname we use.’

‘If I had any self-respect left, I’d get up and walk out.’

‘I’m counting on you to help find me a taxi in a minute. We’ve been doing Benjie’s school shopping today.’

‘Demeter in a department store?’

‘No? I think she would have liked them. Even the gaberdine mackintoshes and gym shoes.’

‘And does she like questions?’

‘That depends on the questions.’

‘Am I ever going to be told what you really think you’re doing?’

‘You have been told.’

‘Lie upon lie.’

‘Perhaps that’s our way of telling the truth.’ But then, as if she knew she had smiled once too often, she looked down and added quickly. ‘Maurice once said to me—when I had just asked him a question rather like yours—he said, “An answer is always a form of death”.’

There was something else in her face then. It was not implacable; but in some way impermeable.

‘I think questions are a form of life.’ She said nothing, though I waited. ‘All right. I treated Alison very badly. I’m a born cad, a swine, whatever you want. But why the colossal performance just to tell one miserable moral bankrupt what he is?’

‘Have you never wondered why evolution should have bothered to split itself up into so many different shapes and sizes? Doesn’t that also seem an unnecessary performance?’

‘Maurice gave me that line. I know what you’re saying in some vague metaphysical way, but—’

‘I should like to be sure. Tell me.’

‘That there must be some purpose in our not all being perfect—not all the same.’

‘And what is the purpose?’

I shrugged. ‘That it allows the duds like me freedom to become a little less imperfect?’

‘Did you have any sense of that before this summer?’

‘I didn’t need to be told I was far from perfect.’

‘Had you done anything about it?’

‘Not very much, no.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it … ‘ I took a breath and looked down. ‘I’m not defending what I was.’

‘And still not accepting what you might become?’

‘It’s not the lesson. The manner of it.’

She hesitated, and once more I was being assessed, but she spoke much less peremptorily.

‘I know they said some terrible things to you at that mock trial, Nicholas. But you were the judge. And if the terrible things had been all that was to be said about you, you would not have given the verdict that you did. Everyone there knew that. Not least my daughters.’

‘Why did she let me make love to her?’

‘I understand it was her wish. Her decision.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

‘Then I imagine to teach you that physical pleasure and moral responsibility are two very different things.’ I recalled Lily’s last words to me on that bed; and decided I had one small secret to myself. That night had been more complex, or less certain, than a planned lesson; or at least it had been a lesson that went both ways. Her mother went on. ‘Nicholas, if one is trying to reproduce, however partially, something of the mysterious purposes that govern existence, then one also has to go beyond some of the conventions man has invented to keep those purposes at bay. That doesn’t mean that in our ordinary lives we think such conventions should be swept away. Far from it. They are necessary fictions. But in the godgame we start from the premise that in reality all is fiction, yet no single fiction is necessary.’ She smiled. ‘And I’m being lured into deeper waters than I meant to enter.’

I gave her a little smile back. ‘But I notice not into what began this—why in practical terms you picked on me.’

‘The basic principle of life is hazard. Maurice tells mc that this is no longer even a matter of debate. If one goes deep enough in atomic physics one ends with a situation of pure chance. Of course we all share the illusion that this can’t be so.’

‘But next year you are fixing the odds a little?’

‘Hardly. Who knows how he will react?’

‘What would have happened if I’d brought Alison to the island? It was suggested at one point.’

‘I can assure you of one thing. Maurice would have recognized at once that she was not a person whose emotional honesty needed to be put to the test.’

I looked down. ‘Does she know about… ?’

‘She understands what we are about. The details… no.’

‘Did she agree at once?’

‘I know she agreed finally, at least to the pretence of suicide, only in the certainty that you would soon discover it was a pretence.’

I left a pause.

‘Have you told her I want to see her?’

‘She knows my views on that.’

‘I’m not worth a further second’s thought.’

‘Only when you say such things.’

I traced patterns with the cake-fork on the table-cloth; determined to seem guarded, unconvinced.

‘What happened to you that very first year?’

‘The desire to help Maurice through following years.’ She was silent a moment, then went on. ‘I will tell you that it all began one weekend, not even that, one long night of talking that began in a guilt. When my uncle died, Bill and I suddenly found ourselves comparatively rich. It had been something of what people nowadays call a traumatic experience for us. We were discussing it with Maurice. Certain … leaps were taken. Certain gaps bridged. I imagine—don’t you?—all new discoveries happen like that. Very abruptly. But totally. And from then on you are obliged to explore them to their limits.’

‘And their victims’ ?’

‘Nicholas, our success is never certain. You have entered our secret. Now you are like a radio-active substance. We hope to keep you stable. But we are not sure.’ She glanced down. ‘Someone … rather in your position … once told me that I was like a pool. He wanted to throw a stone into me. I am not so calm in these situations as I may appear.’

‘I think you handle them very intelligently.’

‘Touchée.’
She bowed her head. Then she said, ‘Next week I’m going away—as I do every autumn when the children are off my hands. I shan’t be hiding, but just doing what I do every September.’

‘You’ll be with … him?’

‘Yes.’

Something curiously like an apology lingered in the air; as if she knew the twinge of strange jealousy I felt and could not deny that it was justified; that whatever richness of relationship and shared experience I suspected, existed.

She looked at her watch. ‘Oh dear. I’m so sorry. But Gunhild and and Benjie will be waiting for me at King’s Cross. Those lovely cakes…’

They lay in their repulsive polychrome splendour, untouched.

‘I think one pays for the pleasure of not eating them.’

She grimaced agreement, and I beckoned to the waitress for the bill. While we were waiting she said, ‘One thing I wanted to tell you is that in the last three years Maurice has had two quite serious heart attacks. So there may not even be … a next year.’

‘Yes. He told me.’

‘And you did not believe him?’

‘No.’

‘Do you believe me?’

I answered obliquely. ‘Nothing you said could make me believe that if he died there would not be another year.’

She took off her gloves. ‘Why do you say that?’

I smiled at her; her own smile.

She nearly spoke, then chose silence. I remembered that phrase I had had to use of Lily: out of role. Her mother’s eyes, and Lily’s through them; the labyrinth; privileges bestowed and privileges rejected. A truce.

A minute later we were going down the corridor towards the entrance. Two men came down it towards us. They were about to pass when the one on the left gave a kind of gasp. Lily de Seitas stopped; she too was caught completely by surprise. He was in a dark-blue suit with a bow tie, a mane of prematurely white hair, a voluble, fleshy mouth in a florid face. She turned quickly.