The Magus (40 page)

‘Have you talked with the other people here?’

‘We’ve never seen the others to talk to. There’s Maria, but she’s hopeless. As impossible to get anything out of as Joe.’

‘The crew on the yacht?’

‘They’re just Greeks. I don’t think they know what goes on here.’ She suddenly said, ‘Did June tell you we suspect there’s a spy at your school?’

‘Who?’

‘Maurice told us one day you were very stand—offish with the other masters. That they didn’t like you.’

I thought at once of Demetriades; of how, when I reflected, it was odd that such a natural gossip should have kept my trips to Bourani so secret. Besides, I
was
stand—offish. He was the only other master I was ever frequently with, outside the common-room. I remembered, with a flash of relief, that I had lied to him about meeting Alison -not out of cunning, but to avoid his wretched jokes.

‘I can guess who it would be.’

‘It’s the one side of Maurice I can’t stand. All this spying. He’s got a cine-camera on the yacht. With a telephoto lens. He claims it’s for birds.’

‘If I ever caught the old bastard

‘I’ve never seen it here. I think it’s just another of his fifty-seven varieties of red herring.’

I watched her, I knew there was some conflict in her, some indecision, some admission she wanted to coax out of me that ran contrary to most of what we had been saying. I remembered what her sister had told me about her the night before; and made a guess.

‘In spite of everything, you want to go on?’

She shook her head. ‘Nicholas, I don’t know. Today, now, yes. Tomorrow, probably not. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I suppose if I have a clear instinct, it’s that if we walked out on it, nothing like it would ever happen again. Do you feel that?’

I had her eyes, and the moment seemed right. I sprang my final test.

‘Not really. Since I know it’s happened at least twice before this year.’

She was so surprised that she did not understand. She stared at my faint smile, then pushed off her stomach and sat back on her heels.

‘You mean you’ve been … this isn’t your first

She was transparently set back. Her eyes, both hurt and lost, accused mine.

‘My two predecessors at the school.’

Still she didn’t understand. ‘They told you? You knew all along?’

‘Just that something odd happened here last year. And the one before.’ I explained how I had found out; and how little; and that the old man had admitted it. Again I watched to see how she would react. ‘He also told me you’d both been here before. And met them.’

She stared at me, outraged. ‘But we’ve never set foot

‘I know.’

She sat sideways and looked out to sea. ‘Oh he’s impossible.’ Then her eyes were back on mine. ‘So all the time you’ve been thinking we –’

‘Not really. I knew he was lying about one thing.’ I described Mitford, and the old man’s tale of his supposed attraction for her. She asked questions, she wanted to know every detail.

‘And you’ve really no idea what happened with them?’

‘They certainly never told anyone at the school. Mitford gave me that one hint. I have written to him. No answer yet.’

She searched my eyes one last time, then looked down. ‘I suppose it argues that it can’t be too awful in the end.’

‘That’s what I try to tell myself

‘How extraordinary.’

‘You’d better not tell him.’

‘No, of course not.’ After a moment she smiled wrily up. ‘Do you think he has an endless supply of twin sisters?’

‘Like you, no. Not even him.’

She looked down from my unambiguous eyes.

‘What do you think we should do?’

‘ When’s he due back? Or pretending to be back?’

‘This evening. Or so we were told yesterday.’

‘It could be an interesting meeting.’

‘I may get the sack for incompetence.’

I said softly, ‘I’ll find you a job.’

There was a little silence, then she met my look. I reached a hand, and it too was met; I pulled her towards me, and we lay side by side, a little apart. I began to trace the lines of her face … the eyes, which she closed, the nose to its tip, then the contour of the mouth. She kissed the finger. I drew her closer and kissed the mouth. She responded, yet I sensed a reserve still; a wanting, and not wanting. We separated a little, I stared at that face. It seemed to me one I could never tire of, an eternal source of desire, of the will to protect; without either physical or psychological flaw. She opened her eyes and gave me a gentle, but reticent, smile.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘How beautiful you are.’

‘Did you really not meet your friend in Athens?’

‘Would you be jealous if I had?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I didn’t.’

‘I bet you did really.’

‘Honestly. She couldn’t make it.’

‘Then you did want to meet her?’

‘Out of some sort of kindness to dumb animals. Only to tell her it was no good. I’d given my soul to a witch.’

‘Some witch.’

I raised her hand and kissed it, then the scar.

‘How did you get that?’

She cocked the wrist and looked at it. ‘When I was ten. Playing hide-and-seek.’ She made a fleeting duck’s mouth, mocking herself. ‘I should have learnt my lesson. I hid in a garden shed and knocked this what looked like a long stick off a peg … and put up my arm to shield myself.’ She mimed it. ‘It was a scythe.’

‘You poor thing.’ I kissed the wrist again, then once more drew us close, but after a while left her mouth, kissed the eyes, the neck, the throat, along the curve of the dress above the breasts; then found the mouth again. We explored each other’s eyes. There was something still uncertain in hers; yet something melted as well. Suddenly they closed, and her mouth reached towards mine, as if she could speak better with lips now than in words. But just as we were becoming drowned in each other, unaware of anything but our joined mouths and close-pressed bodies, we were stopped.

It was the bell from the house, a monotonous regular ringing, but insistent, like a tocsin. “We sat up and looked guiltily round: we seemed alone. Julie lifted my hand to see my wrist-watch.

‘It’s probably June. Lunch.’

I leant and kissed her head. ‘I’d rather stay here.’

‘She’ll only come and look for us.’ She flicked me a would-be dry glance. ‘Most men find her more attractive than me.’

‘Then most men are idiots.’

The bell stopped. She kept my hand, and looked at it as we sat side by side. ‘Perhaps they just want something she finds it easier to give than I do.’

‘Any girl can give you that.’ Still she examined my hand, as if it was some object dissociated from me. ‘Did you give it to this other man?’

‘I tried to.’

‘What went wrong?’

She shook her head, as if it was too complicated. But then she said, ‘I’m not a virgin, Nicholas. It’s not that.’

‘But being hurt again?’

‘Being … used again.’

‘How was he using you?’

The bell started afresh. She smiled up at me. ‘It’s a long story. Not now.’

She kissed me quickly, then stood and picked up her basket, while I folded the rug and put it over my arm. We set off back for the house. We had hardly gone a few steps into the pines when I caught a movement to the east in the corner of my eyes: a glimpse of a black shape drawing back behind intervening low branches some seventy or eighty yards away. I barely saw the man, but there was something unmistakable in the way he moved.

‘We are being watched. That Joe character.’

We didn’t stop, though she glanced past me. ‘We can’t do anything about it. Except ignore him.’

But the presence of that hidden pair of eyes in the trees behind us could not really be ignored. From then on we walked rather selfconsciously apart; almost guiltily. It was a guilt one part of me despised, since the better I knew the real girl beside me the more artificial became the situation that kept us apart; and yet which another side of me, the eternal deception-relishing child, tolerated. There is something erotic in all collusion. Perhaps I should have known a more real guilt and remembered a more deeply hidden pair of eyes in the forest of my unconscious; perhaps I did know them, for all my outward oblivion, and found an extra relish still. Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.

⁴⁷

As we approached the colonnade, a barelegged figure in a brick-red shirt stood from the steps in the sun where she had been sitting.

‘I nearly started without you. I’m hungry.’

The shirt was unbuttoned, and underneath I could see a dark blue bikini. The word, like the fashion, was very new then: in fact it was the first bikini I had ever seen outside a newspaper photograph and it gave me something of a shock … the bare navel, the slender legs, brown-gold skin, a pair of amusedly questioning eyes. I caught Julie wrinkling her nose at this young Mediterranean goddess, who only widened her smile. As we followed her to the table set back in the shade beneath the arches, I remembered the story of
Three Hearts
… but banned the thought before it grew. June went to the corner of the colonnade and called for Maria, then turned to her sister.

‘She’s been trying to tell me something about the yacht. I couldn’t work it out.’

We sat, and Maria appeared. She spoke to Julie. I followed well enough. The yacht was arriving at five, to take the girls away. Hermes was coming to take Maria herself back to the village for a night. She had to see the dentist there. The ‘young gentleman’ must return to the school, as the house would be locked up. I heard Julie ask where the yacht was going.
Then xero, despoina.
I don’t know, miss. She repeated, as if that was the nub of her message, At five o’clock? Then she bobbed in her usual way, and disappeared back to her cottage.

Julie translated for June’s benefit.

I said, ‘This wasn’t planned?’

‘I thought we were staying here.’ She looked doubtfully at her sister, who in turn eyed me, then drily queried Julie back.

‘Do we trust him? Does he trust us?’

‘Yes.’

June gave me a little grin. ‘Then welcome, Pip.’

I looked to Julie for help. She murmured, ‘I thought you claimed to have read English at Oxford.’

There was suddenly a shadow of reawakened suspicion between us. Then I woke up, and took a breath. ‘All these literary references.’ I smiled. ‘Miss Havisham rides again?’

‘And Estella.’

I looked from one to the other. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘Just our little joke.’

Julie regarded her sister.
‘Your
little joke.’

June spoke to me. ‘Which I’ve tried to get Maurice to share. With total unsuccess.’ She leant her elbows on the table. ‘But come on. Tell me what great conclusions you’ve reached.’

‘Nicholas has told me something extraordinary.’

I was given one more chance to test a reaction; and found myself once more convinced, though June seemed more outraged than amused by the new evidence of the old man’s duplicity. As we went over it all again, I discovered (and might have already deduced from their names) that in terms of delivery June was the older twin. She also seemed it in other ways. I detected a protectiveness in her towards Julie, which sprang from a more open personality, greater experience of men. There was a shadow of reality in the casting of the masque: a more normal and a less normal sister, or one more assertive, the other more fragile. I sat between them, facing the sea, keeping an eye open for the hidden watcher – though he stayed hidden, if he was still spying on us. The girls started questioning me, my own background and past.

So we talked about Nicholas: his family, his ambitions, his failings. The third person is apt, because I presented a sort of fictional self to them, a victim of circumstances, a mixture of attractive raffishness and essential inner decency. Alison came up again briefly. I put the main blame there on hazard, on fate, on elective affinity, one’s knowing one sought more; and let them feel, copying Julie, that I didn’t want to talk in detail about all that. It was over and done with, pale and sour beside the present.

Something about that long lunch, the enjoyable food and the
retsina,
all the debating and speculating, the questions they asked, the being between the two of them, the dressed and the near-naked, feeling closer to them both all the time – we got on to their father, their having lived their childhood in the shadow of a boys’ boarding-school, then their mother, they kept capping each other’s affectionate stories about her silliness … it was like entering a deliriously warm room after a long, cold journey; an erotically warm room, as well. Towards the end of the meal June slipped out of her shirt. In return Julie slipped out a sisterly tongue, which was met by an impervious little smile. I began to have trouble keeping my eyes off that body. The bikini top barely covered the breasts; and the bottom half was tied at the hips by white laces that let the skin show through. I knew I was being visually teased a little, innocently flirted with … some small revenge, perhaps, on June’s part for having been kept so long in the wings. If human beings could purr, I should have done so then. About half past two we decided to go out of Bourani and down to Moutsa to swim – partly to see whether we should be allowed to. If Joe blocked our way, I promised not to challenge him. The girls seemed to share my own view of his physical strength. So we strolled down the track, expecting to be stopped, as June had been once. But there was no one there; only the pines, the heat, the racket of the cicadas. We installed ourselves halfway down the beach, near the little chapel in the trees. I spread two rugs where the needled earth ran into the shingle. Julie, who had disappeared for a minute before we left the house, peeled off her schoolgirl stockings, then pulled her dress over her head. She was wearing a white one-piece bare-backed costume underneath, and she managed to look shyly ashamed at the weakness of her own tan.