The Magus (16 page)

‘My dear young man, you are a disaster. So defeated. So pessimistic’

‘I was rather ambitious once. I ought to have been blind as well. Then perhaps I wouldn’t feel defeated.’ I looked at him. ‘It’s not all me. It’s in the age. In all my generation. We all feel the same.’

‘In the greatest age of enlightenment in the history of this earth? When we have destroyed more darkness in this last fifty years than in the last five million?’

‘As at Neuve Chapelle? Hiroshima?’

‘But you and I! We live, we are this wonderful age.
We
are not destroyed. We did not even destroy.’

‘No man is an island.’

‘Pah. Rubbish. Every one of us is an island. If it were not so we should go mad at once. Between these islands are ships, aeroplanes, telephones, wireless – what you will. But they remain islands. Islands that can sink or disappear for ever. You are an island that has not sunk. You cannot be such a pessimist. It is not possible.’

‘It seems possible.’

‘Come with me.’ He stood up, as if time was vital. ‘Come. I will show you the innermost secret of life. Come.’ He walked quickly round to the colonnade. I followed him upstairs. There he pushed me out on to the terrace.

‘Go and sit at the table. With your back to the sun.’

In a minute he appeared, carrying something heavy draped in a white towel. He put it carefully on the centre of the table. Then he paused, made sure I was looking, before gravely he removed the cloth. It was a stone head, whether of a man or a woman it was difficult to say. The nose had been broken short. The hair was done in a fillet, with two sidepieces. But the power of the fragment was in the face. It was set in a triumphant smile, a smile that would have been smug if it had not been so full of the purest metaphysical good humour. The eyes were faintly oriental, long, and as I saw, for Conchis put a hand over the mouth, also smiling. The mouth was beautifully modelled, timelessly intelligent and timelessly amused.

‘That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not
yin
and
yang.
But the smile.’

‘It’s Cycladic, isn’t it?’

‘Never mind what it is. Look at it. Look into its eyes.’

He was right. The little sunlit thing had some numen; or not so much a divinity, as a having known divinity, in it; of being ultimately certain. But as I looked, I began to feel something else.

‘There’s something implacable in that smile.’

‘Implacable?’ He came behind my chair and looked down over my head. ‘It is the truth. Truth is implacable. But the nature and meaning of this truth is not.’

‘Tell me where it came from.’

‘From Didyma in Asia Minor.’

‘How old is it?’

‘The sixth or seventh century before Christ.’

‘I wonder if it would have that smile if it knew of Belsen.’

‘Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.’ Then he said, ‘When I die, I shall have this by my bedside. It is the last human face I want to see.’

The little head watched our watching; bland, certain, and almost maliciously inscrutable. It flashed on me that it was also the smile that Conchis sometimes wore; as if he sat before the head and practised it. At the same time I realized exactly what I disliked about it. It was above all the smile of dramatic irony, of those who have privileged information. I looked back up at Conchis’s face; and knew I was right.

24

A starry darkness over the house, the forest, the sea; the dinner cleared away, the lamp extinguished. I lay back in the long chair. He let the night silently envelop and possess us, let time fall away; then began to draw me back down the decades.

‘April, 1915. I returned without trouble to England. I did not know what I should become. Except that I had in some way to justify myself. At nineteen one is not content simply to do things. They have to be justified as well. My mother fainted when she saw me. For the first and last time in my life I saw my father in tears. Until that moment of confrontation I had determined that I would tell the truth. That I could not deceive them. Yet before them … perhaps it was pure cowardice, it is not for me to say. But there are some truths too cruel, before the faces one has to announce them to, to be told. So I said that I had been lucky in a draw for leave, and that now Montague was dead I was to rejoin my original battalion. I grew possessed by madness to deceive. Not economically, but with the utmost luxury. I invented a new battle of Neuve Chapelle, as if the original had not been bad enough. I even told them I had been recommended for a commission.

‘At first fortune was on my side. Two days after I returned, official notification came that I was missing, believed killed in action. Such mistakes occurred frequently enough for my parents to suspect nothing. The letter was joyously torn up.

‘And Lily. Perhaps what had passed had made her see more clearly her real feelings for me. Whatever it was, I could no longer complain that she treated me more like a brother than a lover. You know, Nicholas, that whatever miseries the Great War brought it destroyed a great deal that was unhealthy between the sexes. For the first time for a century woman discovered that men wanted something more human from them than a nun-like chastity, a
bien pensant
idealism. I do not mean that Lily suddenly lost all reserve. Or gave herself to me. But she gave as much to me as she could. The time I spent alone with her … those hours allowed me to gather strength to go on with my deception. At the same time as they made it more terrible. Again and again I was possessed by a desire to tell her all, and before justice caught up with me. Every time I returned home I expected to find the police waiting. My father outraged. And worst of all, Lily’s eyes on mine. But when I was with her I refused to talk about the war. She misinterpreted my nervousness. It touched her deeply and brought out all her gentleness. Her warmth. I sucked on her love like a leech. A very sensual leech. She had become a very beautiful young woman.

‘One day we went for a walk in woods to the north of London -near Barnet, I think, I no longer recall the name, except that they were in those days very pretty and lonely woods for a place so near London.

‘We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only lay on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

‘That afternoon Lily said she wanted to marry me. To marry by special licence, and if necessary without her parents’ permission, so that before I went away again we should have become one in body as we were in – dare I say spirit? – at any rate, in mind. I longed to sleep with her, I longed to be joined to her. But always my dreadful secret lay between us, like the sword between Tristan and Isolde. So I had to assume, among the flowers, the innocent birds and trees, an even falser nobility. How could I refuse her except by saying my death was so probable that I could not allow such a sacrifice? She argued. She cried. She took my faltering, my tortured refusals for something far finer than they really were. At the end of the afternoon, before we left the wood, and with a solemnity and sincerity, a complete dedication of herself that I cannot describe to you because such unconditional promising is another extinct mystery … she said, “Whatever happens I shall never marry anyone but you.”‘

He stopped speaking for a moment, like a man walking who comes to a brink; perhaps it was an artful pause, but it made the stars, the night, seem to wait, as if story, narration, history, lay imbricated in the nature of things; and the cosmos was for the story, not the story for the cosmos.

‘My fortnight’s supposed leave drew to an end. I had no plan, or rather a hundred plans, which is worse than having none at all. There were moments when I considered returning to France. But then I saw ghastly yellow figures staggering like drunkards out of the wall of smoke … I saw the war and the world and why I was in it. I tried to be blind, but I could not.

‘I put on my uniform and let my father and mother and Lily see me off at Victoria. They believed I had to report to a camp near Dover. The train was full of soldiers. I once again felt the great current of war, the European death-wish, rushing me along. When the train stopped at some town in Kent I got off. For two or three days I stayed there in a commercial travellers’ hotel. I was hopeless. And purposeless. One could not escape the war. It was all one saw, all one heard. In the end I went back to London to the one person in England where I thought there might be refuge: to my grandfather’s – my great-uncle in fact. I knew he was Greek, that he loved me because I was my mother’s child, and that a Greek will put family above every other consideration. He listened to me. Then he stood up and came to me. I knew what he was going to do. He struck me hard, very hard, so hard that I still feel it, across the face. Then he said, “That is what I think.”

‘I knew very well that when he said that he meant “in spite of whatever help I shall give you”. He was furious with me, he poured every insult in the Greek language over my head. But he hid me. Perhaps because I said that even if I returned I should now be shot for desertion. The next day he went to see my mother. I think that he may have given her the choice. Of doing her duty as a citizen or as a mother. She came to see me, with a lack of spoken reproach that was worse to me than
o Pappous’s
anger. I knew what she would suffer when my father heard the truth. She and
o Pappous
came to a decision. I would have to be smuggled out of England to our family in the Argentine. Fortunately
o Pappous
had both the money and the necessary friends in the shipping world. The arrangements were made. A date was fixed.

‘I lived in his house for three weeks, unable to go out, in such an agony of self-disgust and fear that many times I wanted to give myself up. Above all it was the thought of Lily that tortured me. I had promised to write every day. And of course I could not. What other people thought of me, I did not care. But I was desperate to convince her that I was sane and the world was mad. It may have something to do with intelligence, but I am certain it has nothing to do with knowledge – I mean that there are people who have an instinctive yet perfect moral judgment, who can perform the most complex ethical calculations as Indian peasants can sometimes perform astounding mathematical feats in a matter of seconds. Lily was such a person. And I craved her approval.

‘One evening I could stand it no longer. I slipped out of my hiding-place and went to St John’s Wood. It was an evening when I knew Lily went to a weekly patriotic sewing and knitting circle in a near-by parish hall. I waited in the road I knew she must take. It was a warm May dusk. I was fortunate. She came alone. Suddenly I stepped out into her path from the gateway where I had been waiting. She went white with shock. She knew something terrible had happened, by my face, my civilian clothes. As soon as I saw her my love for her overwhelmed me – and what I had planned to say. I cannot remember now what I said. I can remember only walking beside her in the dusk towards Regent’s Park, because we both wanted darkness and to be alone. She would not argue, she would not say anything, she would not look at me for a long time. We found ourselves by the gloomy canal that runs through the north of the park. On a seat. Then she began to cry. I was not allowed to comfort her. I had deceived her. That was the unforgivable. Not that I had deserted. But that I had deceived. For a time she stared away from me, down the black canal. Then she put her hand on mine and stopped me talking. Finally she put her arms round me, and still without words. And I felt myself all that was bad in Europe in the arms of all that was good.

‘But there was so much misunderstanding between us. It is possible, even normal, to feel right in front of history and very wrong in front of those one loves. After a while Lily began to talk, and I realized that she understood nothing of what I had said about the war. That she saw herself not as I so much wanted, as my angel of forgiveness, but as my angel of salvation. She begged me to go back. She thought I would be spiritually dead until I did. Again and again she used the word “resurrected”. And again and again, on my side, I wanted to know what would happen to us. And finally she said, this was her judgment, that the price of her love was that I should return to the front – not for her, but for myself. To find my true self again. And that the reality of her love was as it had been in the wood: she should never marry anyone else, whatever happened.

‘In the end we were silent. You will have understood. Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity. We were at the opposite poles of humanity. Lily was humanity bound to duty, unable to choose, suffering, at the mercy of social ideals. Humanity both crucified and marching towards the cross. And I was free, I was Peter three times to renounce – determined to survive, whatever the cost. I still see her face. Her face staring, staring into the darkness, trying to gaze herself into another world. It was as if we were locked in a torture chamber. Still in love, yet chained to opposite walls, facing each other for eternity and for eternity unable to touch.

‘Of course, as men always will, I tried to extract some hope from her. That she would wait for me, not judge me too quickly … such things. But she stopped me with a look. A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgin Mary’s; it reversed the entire order of nature.

‘I walked back beside her, in silence. I said goodbye to her under a street lamp. By a garden full of lilac trees. We did not touch. Not a single word. Two young faces, suddenly old, facing each other. The moment that endures when all the other noises, objects, all that dull street, have sunk into dust and oblivion. Two white faces. The scent of lilac. And bottomless darkness.’

He paused. There was no emotion in his voice; but I was thinking of Alison, of that last look she had given me.

‘And that is all. Four days later I spent a very disagreeable twelve hours crouched in the bilges of a Greek cargo boat in Liverpool docks.’

There was a silence.

‘And did you ever see her again?’

A bat squeaked over our heads.

‘She died.’

I had to prompt him.

‘Soon after?’

‘In the early hours of February the nineteenth, 1916.’ I tried to see the expression on his face, but it was too dark. ‘There was a typhoid epidemic. She was working in a hospital.’

‘Poor girl.’

‘All past.’

‘You make it seem present.’ He inclined his head. ‘The scent of lilac’

‘Old man’s sentiment. Forgive me.’

He was staring into the night. The bat flitted so low that I saw its silhouette for a brief moment against the Milky Way.

‘Is this why you never married?’

‘The dead live.’

The blackness of the trees. I listened for footsteps, but none came. A suspension.

‘How do they live?’

And yet again he let the silence come, as if the silence would answer my questions better than he could himself; but just when I had decided he would not answer, he spoke.

‘By love.’

It was as if he said it not to me, but equally to everything around us; as if she stood listening, in the dark shadows by the doors; as if the telling of his past had reminded him of some great principle he was seeing freshly again. I found myself touched, and this time let the silence stay.

A minute later, he turned to me.

‘I should like you to come next week. If your duties permit.’

‘If you invite me nothing could keep me away.’

‘Good. I am glad.’ But his gladness now sounded merely polite. Pcremptoriness had regained command. He stood. ‘To bed. It is late.’

I followed him through to my room, where he bent to light the lamp.

‘I do not want my life discussed over there.’

‘Of course not.’

He straightened, faced me.

‘So. I shall see you next Saturday?’

I smiled. ‘You know you will. I shall never forget these last two days. Even though I don’t know why I’m elect. Or elected.’

‘Perhaps your ignorance is why.’

‘As long as you know the election feels a great privilege.’

He searched my eyes, then did something strange: reached out, as he had in the boat, and touched my shoulder paternally. I had indeed, it seemed, passed some test.

‘Good. Maria will have some breakfast for you. Till next week.’

And he was gone. I went to the bathroom, closed my door, turned the lamp out. But I didn’t undress. I stood by the window and waited.