The Magus, A Revised Version (101 page)

The house back there, did he know who it belonged to?

Yes. To a widow called Ralli, who lived in Corfu.

I looked through the rear window. The ticket-seller was walking quickly, much too quickly, in the opposite direction; and as I watched, he turned down a side-alley out of sight.

At four o
’
clock that afternoon, when it was cooler, I caught a bus out to the cemetery. It lay some miles outside Athens, on a wooded slope of Mount Aegaleos. When I asked the old man at the gate I half expected a blank look. But he went painfully inside his lodge, fingered through a large register, and told me I must go up the main alley; then fifth left. I walked past
lines of toy Ionic temples and
columned busts and fancy steles, a forest of Hellenic bad taste; but pleasantly green and shady.

Fifth left. And there, between two cypresses, shaded by a mournful aspidistra-like plant, lay a simple Pentelic marble slab with, underneath a cross, the words:

ÌÙÑÉÅ ÊÏÃ×ÉÓ

1
896
– I
949

Four years dead.

At the foot of the slab was a small green pot in which sat, rising from a cushion of inconspicuous white flowers, a white arum lily and a red rose. I knelt and took them out. The stems were recently cut, probably from only that morning; the water was clear and fresh. I understood; it was his way of telling me what I had already guessed, that detective work would lead me nowhere
–
to a false grave, to yet another joke, a smile fading into thin air.

I replaced the flowers. One of the humbler background sprigs fell and I picked it up and smelt it; a sweet, honey fragrance. Since there was a rose and a lily, perhaps it had some significance. I put it in my buttonhole, and forgot about it.

At the gate I asked the old man if he knew of any relatives of the deceased Maurice Conchis. He looked in his book again for me, but there was nothing. Did he know who had brought the flowers? No, many people brought flowers. The breeze raised the wispy hairs over his wrinkled forehead. He was an old, tired man.

The sky was very blue. A plane droned down to the airport on the other side of the Attic plain. Other visitors came, and the old man limped away.

The dinner that evening was dreadful, the epitome of English vacuity. Before I went, I had some idea that I might tell them a little about Bourani; I saw a spellbound dinner-table. But the idea did not survive the first five minutes of conversation. There were eight of us, five from the Council, an Embassy secretary, and a little middle-aged queer, a critic, who had come to do some lectures. There was a good deal of literary chit-chat. The queer waited like a small vulture for names to be produced.

‘
Has anyone read Henry Green
’
s latest?
’
asked the Embassy man.

‘
Couldn
’
t stand it.
’

‘
Oh I rather enjoyed it.
’

The queer touched his bow-tie.
‘
Of course you know what dear Henry said when he …
‘

I looked round the other faces, after he had done this for the tenth time, hoping to see a flicker of fellow-feeling, someone else who wanted to shout at him that writing was about books, not the trivia of private lives. But they were all the same, each mind set in the same weird armour, like an archosaur
’
s ruff, like a fringe of icicles. All I heard the whole evening was the tinkle of broken ice-needles as people tried timidly and vainly to reach through the stale fence of words, tinkle, tinkle, and then withdrew.

Nobody said what they really wanted, what they really thought. Nobody behaved with breadth, with warmth, with naturalness; and finally it became pathetic. I could see that my host and his wife had a genuine love of Greece, but it lay choked in their throats. The critic made a perceptive little disquisition on Leavis, and then ruined it by a cheap squirt of malice. We were all the same; I said hardly anything, but that made me no more innocent
–
or less conditioned. The solemn figures of the Old Country, the Queen, the Public School, Oxbridge, the Right Accent, People Like Us, stood around the table like secret police, ready to crush down in an instant on any attempt at an intelligent European humanity.

It was symptomatic that the ubiquitous person of speech was
‘
one
’
–
it was one
’
s view, one
’
s friends, one
’
s servants, one
’
s favourite writer, one
’
s travelling in Greece, until the terrible faceless Avenging
God of the Bourgeois British, One, was standing like a soot-blackened
obelisk over the whole evening.

I walked back to the hotel with the critic, thinking, in a kind of agonized panic, of the light-filled solitudes of Phraxos; of the losses I had suffered.

‘
Dreadful bores, these Council people,
’
he said.
‘
But one has to live.
’
He didn
’
t come in. He said he would stroll up to the Acropolis. But he strolled towards Zappeion, a park where the more desperate of the starving village boys who flock to Athens sell their thin bodies for the price of a meal.

I went to Zonar
’
s in Panepistemiou and sat at the bar and h
ad a
large brandy. I felt upset, profoundly unable to face the return to England. I was in exile, and for ever, whether I lived there or not. The fact of exile I could stand; but the loneliness of exile was intolerable.

It was about half past twelve when I got back to my room. There was the usual hot airlessness of nocturnal Athens in summer. I had just stripped
off
my clothes and turned on the shower when the telephone rang by the bed. I went naked to it. I had a grim idea that it would be the critic, unsuccessful at Zappeion and now looking for a target for his endless Christian names.

‘
Hallo.
’

‘
Meester Ouf It was the night porter.
‘
There is telephone for you.
’

There was a clicketing.

‘
Hallo?
’

‘
Oh. Is that Mr Urfe?
’
It was a man
’
s voice I didn
’
t recognize. Greek, but with a good accent.

‘
Speaking. Who are you?
’

‘
Would you look out of your window, please?
’

Click. Silence. I rattled the hook down, with no result. The man had hung up. I snatched my dressing-gown
off
the bed, switched out the light, and raced to the window.

My third-floor room looked out on a side street.

There was a yellow taxi parked on the opposite side with its back to me, a little down the hill. That was normal. Taxis for the hotel waited there. A man in a white shirt appeared and walked quickly up the far side of the street, past the taxi. He crossed the road just below me. There was nothing strange about him. Deserted pavements,
street lights, closed shops, and darkened
off
ices, the one taxi. The man
disappeared. Only then was there a movement.

Directly opposite and beneath my window was a street-light fixed on the wall over the entrance to an arcade of shops. Because of the angle I could not see to the back of the arcade.

A girl came out.

The taxi-engine broke into life.

She knew where I was. She came out to the edge of the pavement, small, unchanged yet changed, and stared straight up at my window. The light shone down on her
brown arms, but her face was in
shadow. A black dress, black shoes, a small black evening handbag in her left hand. She came forward from the shadows as a prostitute might have done; as Robert Foulkes had done. No expression, simply the stare up and across at me. No duration. It was all over in fifteen seconds. The taxi suddenly reversed up the road to in front of her. Someone opened a door, and she got quickly in. The taxi jerked
off
very fast. Its wheels squealed scaldingly at the end of the street.

A crystal lay shattered.

And all betrayed.

At the last moment I had angrily cried her name. I thought at first that they had found some fantastic double; but no one could have imitated that walk. The way of standing.

I leapt back to the phone and got the night porter.

‘
That call
–
can you trace it?
’
He didn
’
t understand
‘
trace
’
.
‘
Do you know where it came from?
’

No, he didn
’
t know.

Had anyone strange been in the hotel lobby during the last hour? Anyone waiting for some time?

No, Meester Ouf, nobody.

I turned
off
the shower, tore back into my clothes and went out into Constitution Square. I went round all the cafes, peered into all the taxis, went back to Zonar
’
s, to Tom
’
s, to Zaporiti
’
s, to all the fashionable places in the area; unable to think, unable to do anything but say her name and crush it savagely between my teeth.

Alison. Alison. Alison.

I understood, how I understood. Once I had accepted, and I had to accept, the first incredible fact: that she must have agreed to join them. But how could she? And why? Again and again: why.

I went back to the hotel.

Conchis would have discovered about the quarrel, perhaps even overheard it; if he used cameras, he
could use microphones and tape—
recorders. Approached her during the night, or early the next morning … those messages in the Earth:
Hirondelle.
The people in the Piraeus hotel, who had watched me try to persuade her to let me back into the room. As soon
I
mentioned her name, Conchis must have pricked up his ears; as soon as he knew she was coming to Athens, envisaged new complications in his plans. He would have had us followed from the moment we met; then persuaded her, all his charm, perhaps half deceiving her to begin with … I had a strange moment of non-sexual jealousy, a vision of his telling her the truth: I wish to give this selfish young man of yours a lesson he will never forget. I remembered old spats with Alison over something not entirely unconnected: various contemporary
“
writers and painters. Pointing out their faults had always pleased me more than hearing her fall for their virtues; even there I had used to feel slighted personally … as she had been shrewd enough to tell me, often enough.

Or had she always been working for him? Hadn
’
t he almost forced me to meet her by cancelling that half-term weekend? Even
off
ered me the village house, if I wanted to bring her to the island? But I remembered something
‘
June
’
had said on that last night
–
how they improvized, how the
‘
rat
’
was granted parity with the experimenter in constructing the maze. I could believe that: so they must somehow, after her screaming at the Piraeus hotel, have found a way to buy Alison with their sick logic, their madness, their lies, their money … perhaps told her the great secret I was not allowed to know: why they had chosen me in the first place. I also remembered all the lies I had told them about Alison, over matters on which they must have had full knowledge. I growled out loud at the recall.

Then too, on reflection, it had always been odd how little use had been made of
‘
June
’
. There were all her costumes in the Earth. A much fuller role must have been planned for her before Alison
’
s unexpected
‘
entry
’
. That very first face-to-face
–
mouth-to-mouth -meeting with her, with its implicit sneer at my inconstancy, that repeated nonsense about the
Three Hearts
story
–
they showed how things might have gone. Then the Sunday, on the beach, that flaunting of her bare body … perhaps Conchis had not been sure of Alison so soon after the first approach, other contingencies had to be allowed for. Then Alison must have been won, and
‘
June
’
withdrew from the action. That
“
was also why Lily
’
s character and part had
changed and why she had to take on
–
and so rapidly
–
the Circe role.