The Magus (20 page)

I looked back: Conchis still sat as before … then at Lily, who watched the figure without expression, yet with a kind of intentness – as if she had seen this rehearsed, and was now curious to see the full performance – that silenced any desire in me to be facetious. The charade itself shocked me less than the revelation that I was not the only young male at Bourani. I knew that at once.

‘Who is he?’

‘My brother.’

‘I thought you were meant to be an only child.’

The Apollo figure raised his horn sideways and blew a different note, sustained, yet more urgent, as if calling lost hounds.

Lily said slowly, without taking her eyes from him, ‘That is in the other world.’ And then, before I could challenge her further, she pointed to our left, beyond the cottage. A faint light shape came running out of the dark tunnel where the track to the house emerged from the trees. The torch-beam moved to her – it was a girl, and she too was naked, except for antique sandals that were laced up her calves; or perhaps not quite naked – either the pubic hair had been shaved or she wore some kind of
cache-sexe.
Her hair was bound back in a classical style, and as with the Apollo her body and face seemed unnaturally white. She was running too quickly for me to see her features. She threw a look back as she came towards us, she was being chased.

She ran towards the sea, between the Apollo and the two of us standing on the terrace. Then a third figure appeared behind her. Another man, running out of the trees and down the track. He was got up as a satyr, in some kind of puffed-out hairy tights, goat-haunches ; and he had the traditional head, a beard, two stubby horns. His naked torso was dark, almost black. As he ran closer, gaining on the girl, I had my next shock. A huge phallus rose from his loins. It was nearly eighteen inches long, far too massive to be meant realistically, but it was effectively obscene. I suddenly remembered the painting in the bowl of the kylix in the room below us; and also remembered I was a long way from home. I felt unsure, out of my depth, a lot more innocent and unsophisticated at heart than I liked to pretend. I slid a quick look at the girl beside me. I thought I detected a faint smile, a kind of excitement at cruelty, even when being mimed, that I did not like; it was very remote from the Edwardian ‘other world’ whose clothes she still wore.

I looked back at the nymph, at her white back and dishevelled hair, her seemingly near-exhausted legs. She plunged into the trees going down towards the sea, and disappeared – and then, in a
coup de théâtre,
a much stronger beam shone out from directly beneath where we stood. Standing there, in the place where the first girl had just disappeared, a place where the ground rose a little before falling abruptly towards the beach, was yet another, the most striking figure of all, a woman in a long saffron chiton. It had a blood-red hem where it ended at the knees. On her feet were black buskins with silver greaves, which gave her a grim gladiatorial look, in strange contrast to the bare shoulders and arms. Again the skin was unnaturally white, the eyes elongated by black make-up, and the hair was also elongated backwards in a way that was classical yet sinister. Over her shoulders she had a silver quiver and in her left hand, a silver bow. Something in her stance, as well as the distorted face, was genuinely frightening.

She stood there for several moments, cold and outraged and ominously barring the way. Then she reached back with her free hand and with a venomous quickness pulled an arrow out of the quiver. But before she could fit it to the bow-string, the beam tracked back to the arrested satyr. He stood spectacularly terrified, his arms flung back and his head averted, the mock phallus – in the better light I could see it was jet black – still erect. It was a pose without realism, yet dramatic. The beam swept back to the goddess. She had her bow at full stretch, the arrow went. I saw it fly, but lost it in the darkness. A moment later the beam returned to the satyr. He was clutching the arrow – or an arrow – to his heart. He fell slowly to his knees, swayed a second, then slumped sideways among the stones and thyme-bushes. The stronger torch lingered on him, as if to impress the fact of his death; then it was extinguished. Beyond, in the weaker original beam, Apollo stood impassively, surveying, a pale marmoreal shadow, like some divine umpire, president of the arena. The goddess began to walk, a striding huntress walk, her silver bow held in one hand by her side, towards him. They stood facing us for a moment, then each raised a free hand, the palm bent back, in a kind of final tableau, a grave salutation. It was another effective gesture. It had a fleeting, but genuine, dignity, the farewell of immortals. But then the remaining light went out. I could still just distinguish the two pale shadows, turning away now with the rather mundane haste of actors eager to get offstage while the lights are down.

Lily moved, as if to distract me from this more pedestrian side of things.

‘Excuse me one moment.’

She crossed towards where Conchis sat. I saw her bend over and whisper something. Then I looked back to the east. A dark shape moved towards the trees: the satyr. There was a tiny sound from the colonnade below, someone had accidentally bumped into a chair and made its legs scrape. Four other actors, two people doing the lighting … the mechanics of the mounting of this and the other incidents began to seem quite as uncanny as truly supernatural happenings. I tried to imagine what connection there was between the elderly man on the road by the hotel, the ‘pre-haunting’, and this scene I had just witnessed. I thought I had grasped, during Conchis’s telling, the point of the
caractère
of de Deukans. He had been talking of himself and me – the parallels were too close for it to mean anything else.
‘And discouraged every kind of question … ‘how unable ‘I was to judge him’
… ‘very few friends and no relations’ …
but where did that tie in with this latest episode?

Plainly it was an attempt at the sort of ‘scandalous evocation’ mentioned in
Le Masque Français.
At that level I could laugh at it, and at any attempt to resurrect the psychic nonsense. But more and more I smelt some nasty drift in Conchis’s divertimenti. That phallus, the nakedness, the naked girl… I had an idea that sooner or later I was going to be asked to perform as well, that this was some initiation to a much darker adventure that I was prepared for, a society, a cult, I didn’t know what, where Miranda was nothing and Caliban reigned. I also felt irrationally jealous of all these other people who had appeared from nowhere to poach in ‘my’ territory, who were in some way in conspiracy against me, who knew more. I could try to be content as a spectator, to let these increasingly weird incidents flow past me as one sits in a cinema and lets the film flow past. But even as I thought that, I knew it was a bad analogy. People don’t build cinemas for an audience of one, unless they mean to use that one for a very special purpose.

At last Lily straightened from where she had stood bent beside Conchis, talking in a low voice to him. She came back towards me. There was a little sliver of knowingness in her eyes now: an unmistakable curiosity to see how I had reacted to this latest development. I smiled and made a little movement of the head: I was impressed, but not fooled … and I was very careful to show her that I was not shocked, either. She smiled.

‘I must go now, Mr Urfe.’

‘Congratulate your friends on their performance.’

She pretended to be taken aback, and her eyelids fluttered as if she knew she was being teased.

‘You surely did not suppose they were merely performing?’

I said gently, ‘Come off it.’

But I received no answer. Her eyes had the tiniest trace of a smile, and then she very delicately bit her lips, before touching her skirt and dropping me the ghost of a curtsey.

‘When shall I see you again?’

Her eyes flicked back towards Conchis, though her head did not move. Once again I was to believe we were in collusion together.

‘That depends on when I am next woken from my immemorial sleep.’

‘I hope it’s very soon.’

She raised her fan to her lips, just as she had with the recorder brush, and pointed surreptitiously back to Conchis. I watched her disappear into the house, then I went and stood across the table from him. He seemed recovered from his trance. His eyes were even more intense than usual, like black phosphorus, almost leechlike; much more the eyes of a scientist checking the result of an experiment, the state of the guinea-pig, than of a host seeking approval from a guest after a spectacular entertainment. I knew he knew I was confused, even though I looked down at him from behind my chair with the same small sceptical smile I had tried on Lily. Somehow I also knew that he no longer expected me to believe what I was supposed to believe. I sat down, and still he stared, and I had to say something.

‘I’d enjoy it all more if I knew what it meant.’

That pleased him. He sat back and smiled.

‘My dear Nicholas, man has been saying what you have just said for the last ten thousand years. And the one common feature of all the gods he has said it to is that not one of them has ever returned an answer.’

‘Gods don’t exist to answer. You do.’

‘I am not going to venture where even the gods are powerless. You must not think I know every answer. I do not.’

I stared at the now bland mask of his face, then said quietly, ‘Why me?’

‘Why anyone? Why anything?’

I pointed to the east, behind him. ‘All that -just to give me a lesson in theology?’

He pointed up to the sky. ‘I think we would both agree that any god who created all that just to give us a lesson in theology was gravely lacking in both humour and imagination.’ He left a pause. ‘You are perfectly free to return to your school if you wish. Perhaps it would be wiser.’

I smiled and shook my head. ‘This time I take the tooth.’

‘This time it may be real.’

‘At least I’m beginning to realize that all your dice are loaded.’

‘Then you cannot possibly win.’ But he went on quickly, as if he had taken a step too far. ‘I will tell you one thing. There is only one answer to your question, both in general terms and in those of your presence here. I gave it to you on your first visit. Why everything is, including you, including me, and all the gods, is a matter of hazard. Nothing else. Pure hazard.’

I searched his eyes and at last found something in them that I could believe; and grasped dimly, somewhere, that my ignorance, my nature, my vices and virtues were somehow necessary in his masque. He stood and fetched the brandy bottle from beside the lamp on the other table. He poured me a glass, then a little in his own, and still standing, raised it to me.

‘Let us both drink to knowing each other better, Nicholas.’

‘I’ll second that.’ I drank, then gave him a cautious smile. ‘You didn’t finish your story.’ Strangely, that seemed to set him back, as if he had forgotten – or presumed I would have no further interest in it. He hesitated, then he sat again.

‘Very well. I was going … but no matter now.’ He paused. ‘Let us jump to the climax. To the moment when these gods that neither of us believes in lost patience with such hubris.’

He leant back, once more turned a little to the sea.

‘Whenever I see a photograph of a teeming horde of Chinese peasants, or of some military procession, whenever I see a cheap newspaper crammed with advertisements for mass-produced rubbish. Or the rubbish itself that large stores sell. Whenever I see the horrors of the
pax Americana,
of civilizations condemned to century after century of mediocrity because of over-population and under-education, I see also de Deukans. Whenever I see lack of space and lack of grace, I think of him. One day, many millennia from now, there will perhaps be a world in which there are only such chateaux, or their equivalents, and such men and women. And instead of their having to grow, like mushrooms, from a putrescent compost of inequality and exploitation, they will come from an evolution as controlled and ordered as de Deukans’s tiny world at Givray-le-Duc. Apollo will reign again. And Dionysus will return to the shadows from which he came.’

Was that it? I saw the Apollo scene in a different light. Conchis was evidently like certain modern poets: he tried to kill ten meanings with one symbol.

‘One day one of his servants introduced a girl into the château. De Deukans heard a woman laughing, I do not know how … perhaps an open window, perhaps she was a little drunk. He sent to find out who had dared to bring a real mistress into his world. It was one of the chauffeurs. A man of the machine age. He was dismissed. Soon afterwards de Deukans went to Italy on a visit.

‘One night at Givray-le-Duc the major-domo smelt smoke. He went to look. The whole of one wing and the centre portion of the chateau were on fire. In their master’s absence most of the servants were away at their homes in the neighbouring villages. The few who were sleeping at the chateau started to carry buckets of water to the mass of flames. An attempt was made to telephone for the
pompiers,
but the line had been cut. When they finally arrived, it was too late. Every painting was shrivelled, every book ashes, every piece of porcelain twisted and smashed, every coin melted, every exquisite instrument, every piece of furniture, each automaton, even Mirabelle, charred to nothingness. All that was left were parts of the walls and the eternally irreparable.

‘I was also abroad at the time. De Deukans was woken somewhere near dawn in his hotel in Florence and told. He went home at once. But they say he turned back before he got to the still smouldering remains. As soon as he was near enough to realize what the fire had done. Two days later he was found dead in his bedroom in Paris. He had taken an enormous quantity of drugs. His valet told me that he was found with a kind of sneer on his face. It had shocked the man.

‘I returned to France a month after his funeral. My mother was in South America and I did not hear what had happened till my return. One day I was asked to go and see his lawyers. I thought he might have left me a harpsichord. So he had. Indeed, all his surviving harpsichords. And also … but perhaps you have guessed.’