The Magus (55 page)

‘I bet you wish we had gone through with
Three Hearts.’

‘I’m gnashing my teeth in disappointment.’

There was another pinch, less gentle this time.

‘Seriously.’

‘You’re like a little girl sometimes.’

‘It’s how I feel.
My
toy.’

‘Who you’re going to take to bed with you tonight?’

‘It’s only a single bed.’

‘Then there won’t be room for pyjamas.’

‘Actually I’ve given up wearing them here.’

‘You’re driving me wild.’

‘I drive myself wild. Lying naked there thinking about you.’

‘What am I doing?’

‘All sorts of wicked things.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I don’t imagine them in words.’

‘Gentle things or rough things?’

‘Things.’

‘Tell me just one.’

She hesitated, then whispered, ‘I run away and you catch me.’

‘What do I do then?’ She said nothing. I reached my hand down her back. ‘Put you over my knees and smack you?’

‘Sometimes I have to be very, very slowly seduced.’

‘Because you’ve never been made love to before?’

‘Mm.’

‘I want to undress you now.’

‘Then you’d have to carry me back.’

‘I wouldn’t mind.’

She leant up on an elbow, then leant across and kissed me, a little smile.

‘Tonight. I promise. And June’s waiting for us.’

‘Let me see your place first.’

‘It’s horrid. Like a tomb.’

‘Just one quick dekko.’

She stared down into my eyes, as if for some reason she was inclined to argue me out of it; then smiled and stood and reached a hand for me. We went back down the steep slope over the sea. Julie stooped and pulled on a stone: the encrusted lid rose, the dark hole gaped. She turned and knelt, felt down with a foot for the top rung of the ladder, then began to clamber down. She reached the bottom some fifteen feet below and her face craned up.

‘Be careful. Some of the rungs are worn.’

I turned and climbed down after her. It was unpleasantly claustrophobic inside the tube. But at the bottom, opposite the ladder, a small square room opened out, about fifteen feet by fifteen. In the poor light I could make out a door in each sidewall and on the side towards the sea, the blocked apertures of what must have once been machine-gun, or observation, slits. A table, three wooden chairs, a small cupboard. There was a fusty staleness in the air, as if silence had a smell.

‘Have you got a match?’

She held out a hurricane lamp, and I lit it. The left wall of the room was painted with a clumsy mural – a beer-cellar scene, foaming steins, bosomy girls with winking eyes. Dim traces showed that there had once been colours, but now it was only the black outlines that remained. It was as remote as an Etruscan wall-painting; of a culture long sunken under time. On the right-hand wall was something more skilful – a perspective street vista that I guessed to be of some Austrian city … Vienna, perhaps. I guessed, too, that Anton had helped to execute it. The two side-doors looked like bulkhead doors aboard a ship. There were massive padlocks on each.

Julie nodded. ‘That was our room, in there. Joe used the other.’

‘What a godawful place. It smells.’

‘We used to call it the Earth. Have you ever smelt a fox-earth?’

‘Why are the doors locked?’

‘I don’t know. They never have been. I suppose there must be people on the island who know the place exists.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘You’re not missing anything. Just costumes. Beds. More ghastly murals.’

I looked at her in the lamplight. ‘You’re a brave girl. To face this sort of thing.’

‘We hated it. So many sour, unhappy men. Locked away here with all that sunlight outside.’

I touched her hand.

‘Okay. I’ve seen enough.’

‘Would you put out the lamp?’

I extinguished it, and Julie turned to climb the ladder to the outside. Slim blue legs, the brilliant daylight dazzling down. I waited a moment at the bottom, to keep clear of her feet, then started after her. The top of her body disappeared.

And then she screamed my name.

Someone, perhaps two someones, had sprung from behind the lid and grabbed her arms. She seemed to be lifted, almost jerked bodily out and away – a leg kicked wildly sideways, as if she were trying to hook a foot behind the counterweight wires. My name again, but cut short; a scuffle of stones outside, out of my sight. I clawed violently up the remaining rungs. For one fraction of a second a face appeared in the opening above. A young man with crew-cut blond hair, the sailor I had seen that morning at the house. He saw I was still two rungs from the top, and immediately slammed the lid down. The shocked counterweights rattled against the metal wall by my feet. I bellowed in the sudden pitch darkness.

‘For God’s sake! Hey! Wait a minute!’

I pushed with all my force on the underside of the lid. It gave infinitesimally, as if someone were sitting or standing on it. But it refused to budge at a second attempt. The tube was too narrow for me to apply much upward pressure.

Once more I strained to heave it up; then listened. Silence. I tried the lid one last time, then gave up and climbed down to the bottom. I struck a match, relit the hurricane-lamp; tried the two massive doors. They were impenetrable. I tore open the cupboard. It was as empty of objects as what had just happened was of reason. Snarling with rage, I remembered Conchis’s fairy-godfather exit: the gay farewell, the fireworks, the bottle of Krug. Our revels now are ended. But this was Prospero turned insane, maniacally determined never to release his Miranda.

I stood at the foot of the ladder and seethed, trying to comprehend the sadistic old man’s duplicities: to read his palimpsest. His ‘theatre without an audience’ made no sense, it couldn’t be the explanation. The one thing all actors and actresses craved was an audience. Perhaps what he was doing did spring in part from some theory of the theatre, but he had said it himself:
The masque is only a metaphor.
So? Some incomprehensible new philosophy: metaphorism? Perhaps he saw himself as a professor in an impossible faculty of ambiguity, a sort of Empson of the event. I thought and thought, and thought again, and arrived at last at nothing but more doubt. It began to extend to Julie and June as well. I returned to the schizophrenia stage. That must be it, it was all planned from the beginning, I was never to have her, always to be tormented, mocked like Tantalus. Yet how could any girl do what she had done – I could still feel her kisses, remember every word of that deliberately erotic little whispered conversation she had initiated – and not mean an iota of it? Except someone who was indeed mentally deranged and in some way aware that her promises need never be met?

But how could a man who claimed to be a doctor allow such things to go on? It was inconceivable.

Half an hour and several attempts later the lid smoothly gave before my upthrust. Three seconds later I was in the sunlight again. The sea “was empty, and the trees around me. I climbed the slope to where I could look further inland, but of course there was nothing. The wind blew through the Aleppo pines, indifferent, inhuman, on another planet. A scrap of white paper, a relic from our lunch, flapped idly where it had caught in a tangle of smilax some fifty yards away. The basket and the bag stood where we had left them; the pink hat where she had laid it when she took it off.

Two minutes later I was at the house. It was shuttered blind, exactly as I had last seen it. I started walking fast down the track towards the gate. And there, just as on my first visit to Bourani, I found that I had been left a clue.

⁵⁷

Or rather, two clues.

They were hanging, from the branch of a pine tree near the gate, in the centre of the path, some six feet from the ground, swinging a little in the wind, innocent and idle, touched by sunlight. One was a doll. The other was a human skull.

The skull hung from a black cord, which passed through a neat hole drilled in the top, and the doll from a white one. Its neck was in a noose. It was hanging in both senses. About eighteen inches high, clumsily carved in wood and painted black, with a smiling mouth and eyes naively whitened in. Round its ankles were its only ‘clothes’ – two wisps of white rag. The doll was Julie, and said that she was evil, she was black, under the white innocence she wore.

I twisted the skull and made it spin. Shadows haunted the sockets, the mouth grinned grimly.

Alas, poor Yorick.

Disembowelled corpses?

Or Frazer …
The Golden Bough?
I tried to remember. What was it? Hanging dolls in sacred woods.

I looked round the trees. Somewhere eyes were on me. But nothing moved. The dry trees in the sun, the scrub in the lifeless shadow. Once again fear, fear and mystery, swept over me. The thin net of reality, these trees, this sun. I was infinitely far from home. The pro-foundest distances are never geographical.

In the light, in the alley between the trees. And everywhere, a darkness beneath.

What it is, has no name.

The skull and his wife swayed in a rift of the breeze. Leaving them there, in their mysterious communion, I walked fast away.

Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians. All I knew was that I ached for Julie, I was mad for her, the world that day had no other meaning; so I strode down to the school like some vengeance-brewing chieftain in an Icelandic saga, though with always the small last chance in mind that I should find Julie waiting for me. But when I flung my door open, I flung it open on to an empty room. Then I felt like going to Demetriades and trying to wring the truth out of him; forcing him to come with me to the science master. I half decided to go to Athens, and even got a suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe; then changed my mind. Probably the fact that there were another two weeks of term to run was the only significant one; two weeks more in which to torment us … or me.

Finally I went down to the village, straight to the house behind the church. The gate was open; a garden green with lemon and orange trees, through which a cobbled path led to the door of the house. Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed facade was in shadow, a palest blue against the evening sky’s pale blue. As I walked between the cool, dark walls of the trees Hermes came out at the front door. He looked behind me, as if surprised to see me alone.

I said in Greek, ‘Is the young lady here?’ He stared at me, then began to open his hands in incomprehension. I cut in impatiently. ‘The other young lady – the sister?’

He raised his head. No.

‘Where is she?’

With the yacht. After lunch.

‘How do you know? You weren’t here.’

His wife had told him.

‘With Mr Conchis? To Athens?’

‘
Nai.’
Yes.

The yacht could easily have called in at one of the village harbours after it had disappeared from our sight; and I supposed June might have gone aboard without fuss, if she had been told we were there. Or it might always have been planned so. I stared at Hermes a moment, then pushed past him and went into the house.

An airy hall, cool and bare, a fine Turkish carpet hanging on one wall; and on another an obscure coat-of-arms, rather like an English funeral hatchment. Through an open door to the left I saw the crates of pictures from Bourani. A small boy stood in the door, he must have been one of Hermes’s children. The man said something to him and after a solemn brown stare the child turned away.

Hermes spoke behind my back. ‘What do you want?’

‘Which rooms were the girls in?’

He hesitated, then pointed up the stairs. I had a reluctant impression that he was genuinely out of his depth. I strode up the stairs. Passages led both left and right, the length of the building. I looked round at Hermes, who had followed me. Again he hesitated; then again he pointed. A door to the right. I found myself in a typical island room. A bed with a folkweave bedspread, a floor of polished planks, a chest of drawers, a fine
cassone,
some pleasant water-colours of island houses. They had the clean, stylish, shallow look of architectural perspectives and though they were unsigned I guessed that once more I was looking at Anton’s work. The west-facing shutters were latched three-quarters closed. On the sill of the open windows stood a wet
kanati,
the porous jug the Greeks put there to cool both air and water. A small bowl of jasmine and plumbago flowers, creamy white and pale blue, sat on top of the
cassone.
A nice, simple, welcoming little scene.

I went and opened one of the shutters to let more light in. Hermes stood in the doorway, staring doubtfully at me. Once again he asked me what I was doing. I noticed he didn’t bother to ask me where Julie was, and this time I ignored him. In a way I hoped he would try to stop me, since I felt a growing need for physical violence of some kind. But he made no move, and I had to vent my frustration on the chest-of-drawers. Apart from one half-drawer with toilet and cosmetic things, it contained nothing but clothes. I gave up, looked round the room. In one corner a rail had been fixed, and a curtain hung there. Ripped aside, it revealed a short row of dresses, skirts, a summer coat. I recognized the pink dress she had worn on the Sunday when I had been told the ‘truth’; or what had then seemed the truth. On the floor were shoes, and behind them, against one of the angles of the wall, a suitcase. I picked it up and threw it on the bed and, without much hope, tried the catches. But they opened.

There were more clothes, two or three woollen jumpers, a heavy tweed skirt, seemingly things not needed in summer Greece; two Greek shoulder-bags, brand-new, there were price-tags still on, as if bought for presents. Underneath lay some books. A pre-war guide to Greece, with some postcards of classical sites and sculpture. None had been written on. A Greene novel. An American paperback on witchcraft, in which a place was marked by a letter. I slipped a printed card out of the envelope. It was an invitation to speech day, a week before, at the London school where Julie had told me she had worked. The envelope had been forwarded to Bourani from Cerne Abbas, her home in Dorset, nearly a month previously. There was also a text of the Palatine Anthology. I flicked it open.
Julia Holmes, Girton.
Some of the poems had little margin notes, English equivalents, in her neat handwriting.