The Magus (59 page)

‘You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’

‘You can’t see me.’

‘Felt.’

I bent and kissed her breasts, then pulled her against me and found her mouth again. She was wearing some strange scent, musky and faintly orange, like cowslips; and it seemed to match something both sensual and innocent in her, a growing abandon to passion that was also a willed attempt to be what she felt I must want: feverish, strained, not playful at all. In the end she tore her mouth away, as if she was exhausted. After a few moments, she whispered.

‘Let’s open the shutters. I love the smell of the rain.’

She slipped away and went to open them. I got quickly out of my remaining clothes, and caught her as she turned back from the window; made her turn, held her close from behind, so that we stood with the rain teeming down three feet away, the cool wall of dark air. All the lights in the village were out, the generator fuse must have blown. Lightning split the sky over towards the mainland and for a moment or two the crowded houses below us, all the walls and the roofs, even the sea below, were illuminated with an uncanny pale-violet light. But the thunder took longer to arrive; the short centre of the storm had already passed on.

Julie leant back against me, abandoning the front of her body to the night and my encircling hands. I smoothed down the little belly, ruffled the pubic hair. Her head turned against me, then she raised her right leg and rested it on a stool below the window, so that the hand could caress more easily. She took my other hand, led it to her breasts; then stood absolutely passive, letting me excite her – as if the rain was her real lover, and the outside night; as if I was now to do to her what she had done to me in the sea. Little splashes of the downpour bounced from the sill against my lower hand and her skin, but she seemed oblivious of them.

I whispered, ‘I wish we could go outside.’

Her mouth twisted to kiss me in quick assent, but then her hands found mine again and pressed to keep them where they were. She preferred this now: to be gently abused, slowly coaxed … there was still lightning, but it began to seem from another world, the only real world was her body and my own … the curves of her back, the warmth there, the pods of silken skin with their aroused tips, the indulged, solicited, caress below. It was a little as I had imagined it in the beginning, the Lily Montgomery phase: this delicate, elusive creature half-swooning, succumbed to the animal part of herself; and not quite adult yet – beneath her airs and graces, something of the innocent perversity of a little girl playing at sex with little boys.

Suddenly, half a minute later, she caught my hands and made them lie on her stomach; imprisoned them.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘You’re being wicked.’

‘That was the idea.’

She turned against me, her face buried.

‘Tell me what you liked her doing to you best.’

I remembered an old Urfe law: that girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education. But I saw some delicious instruction ahead in this case.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Because I want to do it to you.’

I held her a little closer. ‘I like you as you are.’

She whispered, ‘You’re so big.’

Her hands stole down between us. We stood apart a little. There seemed something virginal about her; yet wanting to be corrupted, led further. She whispered again.

‘Have you got a thing?’

‘In my coat.’

‘Shall I put it on for you?’

I went and found the contraceptive, and Julie moved beside the bed. There was a little more light now, the clouds must have thinned slightly, I could just see her silhouette. She took the sheath, made me sit on the end of the bed, knelt on the island rug, leant forward and rolled the sheath on; bent and gave it a little kiss. Then sat back on her heels, hands folded across her loins, demure. I could just see her smile.

‘Liar. I don’t think you’re shy at all.’

‘I did spend five years in a convent dormitory. Where nothing was left to the imagination.’

The rain was easing, but the freshness of it, the smell of cistern, water on stone, pervaded the room. I saw it secretly streaming down the walls of hundreds of cisterns; the excited eels at the bottom.

‘All that talk of running away.’

Her smile deepened, but she said nothing. I reached for her, and she rose, let herself be drawn down on top of me. Silence then, a retreat from everything but the conversation of bodies. She pretended to possess me, mocked and consoled me with her mouth; then a silence even of movement, as if in time she would melt down into me; but that began to seem a waiting in her. I broke the spell, and she shifted, lay back on the rough bedspread, her head on the pillow. I knelt and kissed down her body to the ankles, surveyed her a moment from the bottom of the bed. She lay a little twisted to one side, an arm flung out, her head sideways. But as I moved forward, she turned fully on her back. A few moments later I was deep inside her. It was not like any other such moment of first entry I had ever gained; something well beyond the sexual, there was such a fraught, frustrated past, such a future inherent in it; such a possession. I knew I had won far more than her body. I lay suspended on my arms over her. She was staring up in the darkness.

I said, ‘I adore you.’

‘I want you to.’

‘Always?’

‘Always.’

I began to thrust slowly – but then something strange happened. Without warning, the lamp beside the bed came on again. They must have mended the generator, down in the village. I stopped my movement, for a second or two we were comically like two shocked strangers, our eyes locked in embarrassment; so much so that we had to smile. I looked down her slim body to where we were joined, then back to her face. I sensed something troubled and shy in her look, but then she closed her eyes and let her head fall sideways in profile. If I wanted it so …

I began to drive. Her arms bent back behind her head, as if she was defenceless, doubly naked, completely at my mercy; that lovely slavelike limpness in everything but the loins. There was a tiny rhythmic creaking somewhere in the bedframe. She seemed so small, fragile, asking for the brutality she had said she had felt in the chapel at Moutsa. Her hands clenched, as if I was really hurting her. I came, it was too soon, but irresistible. I thought it was much too soon for her, but just as I was dying, about to give up, she suddenly raised her arms and urged me on: a brief but convulsive little thrusting against me. Then I was pulled violently down to meet her mouth.

We lay still joined for a little time, in the profound silence of the house; then we were separate, and I moved beside her. She reached out for the lamp-switch and we were in darkness again. She turned on her stomach, her face turned away. I stroked down her back, patted the small bottom, kept caressing its curves. Already, despite the traditional nature of the moment, I felt a marvellous surge of euphoria. I hadn’t expected it to be so shared, so full of promise, like the skin beneath my hand; that she could be so warm, capable of giving. I told myself I ought to have guessed, there was that feeling about June of a girl who enjoyed it, and the same need must have lain buried in the less extravert sister beside me. At last our bodies had expressed themselves; and I knew it would be much better still … subtler, longer, infinite variations. That appled bottom, the tangled hair against my mouth. A distant, receding roll of thunder. Already, outside, there was more light, the moon must have broken partially from behind the clouds. All storms were past, and we lay in the silence of Eden regained.

It was some five minutes later. We had lain in total silence, no words were needed. But then she pushed herself up, leant over me for a moment, stooped and quickly kissed me. She leant back, her face above mine in a hanging cloud of hair, a faint smile, her eyes on mine.

‘Nicholas, will you always remember something about tonight?’

I grinned. ‘What?’

‘That it’s also how, not why.’

Still I smiled. ‘How was beautiful.’

‘As I wanted it to be.’

For the briefest moment she hesitated, almost as if it were some formula she expected me to repeat. Then suddenly she knelt back, turned and was off the bed, and reaching for her kimono. I should have reacted more quickly, at least to the briskness with which she reached for the garment, if not to something in her voice and face when she was looking down at me – a seriousness that had nothing to do with the naivety I first took it for. I leant up on an elbow.

‘Where are you going?’

She didn’t answer for a moment, then turned, tying the kimono sash, and looked down at me. I think there was still a trace of a smile on her face.

‘To the trial.’

‘The what?’

It all happened so impossibly fast. She was already moving away before I had fully registered the change in her voice, its now patent lack of imiocence.

‘Julie?’

She turned at the door; left the tiny pause of the actress before her exit line.

‘My name isn’t Julie, Nicholas. And I’m sorry we can’t provide the customary flames.’

This time I sat fully up – flames, what flames – but before I could speak she had pulled the door open and stepped aside. Light flooded in.

There was a violent cascade of figures.

59

Three men, all in dark trousers and black polo-neck jumpers – they came so quickly that, paralyzed in everything but instinct, I had no time to do anything but grab the bedspread over my loins. The one in the lead was Joe, the Negro. He flung himself at me just as I was about to shout. His hand clapped brutally over my mouth and I felt the strength and weight of him throw me back. One of the others must have turned on the bedside lamp again. I saw another face I knew: the last time I had seen it had been on the ridge, when the owner had been in German uniform, playing Anton. The third face belonged to the blond-headed sailor I had seen twice at Bourani that previous Sunday. I tried as I struggled under Joe to see Julie – I still couldn’t accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka. But all I glimpsed was her back as she left the room. Someone met her there, an arm went round her shoulders as if she had just escaped from an air disaster and drew her out of sight.

I began to fight violently, but they had obviously anticipated that, had loops of rope ready. In less than half a minute I was tied up and lying on my face. I don’t know if I was still shouting obscenities at them; I was certainly thinking them. Then I was gagged. Somebody threw the bedspread over me. I managed to twist my head to see the door.

Another figure appeared in it: Conchis. He was dressed like the others, in black. Flames, devils, hell. He came and stood over me, looked down at my outraged eyes absolutely without expression. I hurled all the hate I had in me at him, tried to make sounds that he could understand. My mind flashed back to that incident in the war: a room at the end of a corridor, a man lying on his back, castrated. My eyes began to fill with tears of frustrated rage and humiliation. I realized at last what Julie’s final look at me had been like. It was that of a surgeon who has just performed a difficult operation successfully; peeling off the rubber gloves, surveying the suture. Trial, flames… they were all mad, they must be, and she the most vicious, shameless, degenerate …

‘Anton’ held out a small open case to Conchis. He took out a hypodermic syringe, checked it was correctly filled, then leant over me a little and showed it.

‘We shall not frighten you any more, young man. But we want you to go to sleep. It will be less painful for you. Please do not struggle.’

The absurd memory of the pile of examination papers I had still to mark went through my mind. Joe and the other man turned me on my back again and gripped my left arm like a vice. I resisted for a few moments, then gave in. A dab of wet. The needle pricked into my forearm. I felt the morphine, or whatever it was, enter. The needle was withdrawn, another dab of something wet. Conchis stood back, watched me a moment, then turned and replaced the syringe in the black medical case it had come from.

I tried to realize what I had got into: a world of people who knew no laws, no limits.

A satyr with an arrow in his heart.

Mirabelle.
La Maîtresse-Machine,
a foul engine made fouler flesh.

Perhaps three minutes passed. Then June appeared in the doorway. She did not look at me. She was dressed like the men, in black shirt and trousers – and I seethed again, remembering she had worn those very clothes outside the school, even then knowing this was to happen – and all this, after I had at last told them about Alison! She moved across the room, her hair tied back now with a black chiffon scarf and coolly began to empty clothes from the corner wardrobe into a suitcase. My head began to swim. Faces and objects, the ceiling, receded from present reality; down and down a deep black mine of shock, incomprehension and flailing depths of impossible revenge.

60

I was to have no sense of time for the next five days. When I first woke up I did not know how many hours had passed. I was very thirsty, and that must have been what woke me. I remember one or two things indistinctly. A sense of surprise that I was in my own pyjamas but not in my room at school; then realizing I was in a bunk, at sea, but not in a caïque. It was the narrowing forecabin of a yacht. I was reluctant to leave my sleep, to think, to do anything but sink back into it. I was handed a glass of water by the young sailor with crew-cut blond hair, who had evidently been waiting for me to wake. I was so thirsty that I had to drink the water, even though I could see it was suspiciously cloudy. Then I must have blurred into sleep again.

The same man made me go to the heads in the bows of the yacht at some later point, and I remember he had to hold me upright, as if I was drunk; and I sat on the pan and just went to sleep again. There were port-holes, but the metal shields were screwed down. I asked one or two questions, but he didn’t answer; and it didn’t seem to matter.

The same procedure happened again, once, twice, I don’t know, in different circumstances. This time I was in a room in a proper bed. It was always night, always, if there was light, an electric light; shadowy figures and voices; then darkness.

But one morning – it seemed like morning, though it might have been midnight for all I knew, because my watch had stopped – I was woken up by the sailor-cum-nurse, made to sit on my bed, to dress, to walk up and down the room twenty or thirty times. Another man I hadn’t seen before stood by the door.

I became conscious of something I had hazily thought to have dreamt: an extraordinary mural that dominated the whitewashed wall opposite the bed. It was a huge black figure, larger than lifesize, a kind of living skeleton, a Buchenwald horror, lying on its side on what might have been grass, or flames. A gaunt hand pointed down to a little mirror hanging on the wall; exhorting me, I supposed, to look at myself, to consider that I must die. The skull-face had a startled and startling intensity that made it uncomfortable to look at; and it was no comfort to think of the mind that had put it there for me. I could see it was newly painted.

There was a knock on the door. A third man appeared. He carried a tray with a jug of coffee on it. It had the most beautiful smell; of real coffee, something like Blue Mountain, not the monotonous ‘Turkish’ powder they use in Greece. And there were rolls, butter, and quince marmalade; a plate of ham and eggs. I was left alone. In spite of the circumstances it was one of the best breakfasts of my life. Every flavour had a Proustian, mescalin intensity. I seemed to be starving, and I ate everything on the tray, I drank every drop of coffee and I could have done it all over again. There was even a pack of American cigarettes and a box of matches-

I took stock. I was wearing one of my own pullovers and whipcord trousers I hadn’t put on since the winter. The high curved ceiling was that of a cistern under a house; the windowless walls were dry, but subterranean. There was electric light. A small suitcase, my own, stood in a corner. My jacket was by it, on a hanger hooked to a nail.

The wall against which the table stood was new-built of brick. It had a heavy wooden door in it. No handle, no spyhole, no keyhole, not even a hinge. I gave it a push, but it was bolted or barred outside. There was another triangular table in the corner – an old-fashioned wash-bowl, with a sanitary bucket underneath. I rummaged in my suitcase; a clean shirt, a change of underclothes, a pair of summer trousers. I saw my razor, and that reminded me that I had a clock of sorts on my chin. At least two days’ stubble stared at me from the mirror. My face was strange to me; degraded and yet peculiarly indifferent. I looked up at the death-figure on the wall above. Death-figure, death-cell, the traditional last breakfast: a mock execution was about the only indignity I had left to undergo.

Behind and beneath everything there was the vile and unforgivable, the ultimate betrayal not just of me, but of all finer instincts, by Julie … Lily … whoever she was. I started to think of her as Lily again, perhaps because her first mask now seemed truer, more true because more obviously false, than the others. I tried to imagine what she really was – obviously a consummate young actress, and consummately immoral into the bargain. Only a prostitute could have behaved as she had; a pair of prostitutes, because I guessed that her sister, June, Rose, might well have been prepared to carry out that final abominable act. Probably they would have liked me to be thus doubly humiliated.

All their stories had been lies; or groundbait. The letters were plainly forgeries – they could not make it so easy for me to trace them. In a grim flash I guessed: none of my post left or came to the island unread. From that I leapt to the grim realization that they must all along have known the truth about Alison. When Conchis had advised me to go back and marry her he must have known she was dead; Lily must have known she was dead. My mind plunged sickeningly, as if I had walked off the edge of the world. I had seen forged newspaper cuttings about the sisters, therefore if it was just a case of forging cuttings… I went to my jacket, where I had put Ami Taylor’s letter after ‘June’ had read it outside the school gates. It was still there. I stared at it and its attachments, searched for some sign that they were all invented … in vain. I remembered that other envelope that I had left in my room and not shown her, with its superscription in Alison’s own handwriting, the pathetic little tangle of withered flowers. Only she could have given them that.

Alison.

I stared into my own eyes in the mirror. Suddenly her honesty, her untreachery – her true death – was the last anchor left. If she too, if she … I was swept away. The whole of life became a conspiracy. I strained back through time to seize Alison, to be absolutely sure of her; to seize a quintessential Alison beyond all her powers of love or hate, beyond all their corrupting. For a while I let my mind wander into a bottomless madness. Supposing
all
my life that last year had been the very opposite of what Conchis so often said – so often, to trick me once again? – about life in general. That is, the very opposite of hazard. The flat in Russell Square … but I had got it by answering a chance advertisement in the
New Statesman.
Meeting Alison that very first evening … but I might so easily have not gone to the party, not have waited those few minutes … and Margaret, Ann Taylor, all of them … the hypothesis became top-heavy, and crashed.

I stared at myself. They were trying to drive me mad, to brainwash me in some astounding way. But I clung to reality. I clung, too, to something in Alison, something like a tiny limpid crystal of eternal non-betrayal. Like a light in the darkest night. Like a teardrop. An eternal inability to be so cruel. And the tears that for a brief moment formed in my own eyes were a kind of bitter guarantee that she was indeed dead.

They were not only tears for her, but also tears of rage at Conchis and Lily; at the certainty that they knew she was dead and were using this new doubt, this torturing possibility that could not be a possibility, to rack me. To perform on me, for some incomprehensible reason, a viciously cruel vivisection of the mind.

As if they only wanted to punish me; and punish me; and punish me again. With no right; and no reason.

I sat with my hands clenched against my head.

Fragments of things they had said kept on coming back, with dreadful double meanings; a constant dramatic irony. Almost every line Conchis and Lily had spoken was ironic; right up to that last, transparently double-meaning dialogue with ‘June’.

That blank weekend: of course they had cancelled it to give me reasonable time to receive the ‘letter of reference’ from the bank; holding me back only to hurl me faster down the slope.

Again and again images of Lily, the Lily of the Julie phase, surged back; moments of passion, that last total surrender of her body – and other moments of gentleness, sincerity, spontaneous moments that could not have been rehearsed but could only have sprung out of a deep identification with the part she was playing. I even went back to that earlier theory I had had, that she was acting under hypnosis. But it wasn’t conceivable.

I lit another Philip Morris. I tried to think of the present. But everything drove me back to the same anger, the same profound humiliation. Only one thing could ever give me relief. Some equal humiliation of Lily. It made me furious that I had not been more violent with her before. That was indeed the ultimate indignity: that my own small stock of decency had been used against me.

There was noise outside, and the door opened. The crew-cut blond sailor came in; behind him was one of the other men, in the same black trousers, black shirt, black gym shoes. And behind him came Anton. He was in a doctor’s collarlcss white overall. A pocket with pens. A bright German-accented voice; as if on his rounds. And he had no limp now.

‘How are you feeling?’

I stared at him; controlled myself.

‘Wonderful. Enjoying every minute of it.’

He looked at the breakfast tray. ‘You would like more coffee?’

I nodded. He gestured to the second man, who took the tray out. Anton sat on the chair by the table, and the young sailor leaned easily against the door. Beyond appeared a long corridor, and right at the end steps leading up to daylight. It was much too big a cistern for a private house. Anton watched me. I refused to speak, and we sat there in silence for some time.

‘I am a doctor. I come to examine you.’ He studied me. ‘You feel … not too bad?’

I leant back against the wall; stared at him.

He waved his finger reprovingly. ‘Please to answer.’

‘I love being humiliated. I love having a girl I like trampling over every human decency. Every time that stupid old bugger tells me another lie I feel thrills of ecstasy run down my spine.’ I shouted. ‘Now where the hell am I?’

He gave me the impression that my words were meaningless; it was my manner he was watching.

He said slowly, ‘Good. You have woken up.’ He sat with his legs crossed, leaning back a little; a very fair imitation of a doctor in his consulting room.

‘Where’s that little tart?’ He seemed not to understand. ‘Lily. Julie. “Whatever her name is.’

He smiled. ‘ “Tart” means bad woman?’

I shut my eyes. My head was beginning to ache. I had to keep cool. The man in the door turned; the second man appeared down the distant steps with a tray and came and put it on the table. Anton poured out a cup for me and one for himself. The sailor passed me mine. Anton swallowed his quickly.

‘My friend, you are wrong. She is a good girl. Very intelligent. Very brave. Oh yes.’ He contradicted my sneer. ‘Very brave.’

‘All I have to say to you is that when I get out of here I am going to create such bloody fucking hell for all of you that you’ll wish to Christ you – ‘

He raised his hand, calmingly, forgivingly. ‘Your mind is not well. We have given you many drugs these last days.’

I took a breath.

‘How many days?’

‘It is Sunday.’

Three totally missing days: I remembered the wretched exam papers. The boys, the other masters … the whole school could not be in league with Conchis. It was the enormity of the abuse that bewildered me, far more than the aftermath of the drug; that they could crash through law, through my job, through respect for the dead, through everything that made the world customary and habitable and orientated. And it was not only a denial of my world; it was a denial of what I had come to understand was Conchis’s world.

I stared at Anton.

‘I suppose this is all good homely fun to you Germans.’

‘I am Swiss. And my mother is Jewish. By the way.’

His eyebrows were very heavy, charcoal tufts, his eyes amused. I swilled the last of the coffee in my cup, then threw it in his face. It stained his white coat. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face and said something to the man beside him. He did not look angry; merely shrugged, then glanced at his watch.

‘The time is ten thirty- … eight. Today we have the trial and you must be awoke. So good.’ He touched his coat. ‘I think you are awoke.’

He stood up.

‘Trial?’

‘Very soon we shall go and you will judge us.’

‘Judge you!’

‘Yes. You think this is like a prison. Not at all. It is like … how call you the room where the judge lives?’

‘Chambers.’

‘Ah so. Chambers. So perhaps you would like to … ‘ He gestured round his chin.

‘Christ!’

‘There will be many people there.’ I stared incredulously at him. ‘It will look better.’ He gave up. ‘Very well. Adam’ – he nodded at the blond head, stressing the name on the second syllable – ‘he will return in twenty minutes to prepare you.’

‘Prepare me?’

‘It is nothing. We have a small ritual. It is nothing for you. For us.’

‘“Us”?’

‘Very soon – you will understand all.’

I wished I had saved the coffee to throw till then.

He smiled, bowed, and went out. The other two closed the door, and a bolt was shot. I stared at the skeleton at the wall. And in his necromantic way he seemed to say the same: very soon, you will understand. All.