The Magus (41 page)

Her sister grinned. ‘If only Maurice could provide the seven dwarfs as well.’

‘Shut up. It’s not fair. I’ll never catch up now.’ She gave me what was almost a scowl. ‘Honestly I’ve been sitting on that wretched yacht under an awning while all she does is … ‘ she turned away and folded her dress.

They both did up their hair, we went down the burning shingle and into the water, and swam a little way out. I looked down the beach towards Bourani, but saw no one. We were alone in the world, in the cool blue water, three heads; and again I felt a near-absolute happiness, a being poised, not sure how all this would turn out, but also not wanting to know, totally identified with the moment: with Greece, this lost place, these two real-life nymphs. We came back ashore, dried, lay on the rugs; myself beside Julie on one of them, she was anointing herself with sun-tan oil; June on the far side on the other rug, flat on her stomach, her head couched on her hands and turned towards us. I thought of the school, its repressed boys and sour masters, the unendurable lack of femininity and natural sexuality in its life. We began to talk about Maurice again. Julie put on sunglasses, lay on her back, while I still lay propped on an elbow.

There came in the end a little silence; the wine at lunch, the soporific sun. June reached back and undid the hook at the back of her bikini top, then stretched up and eased it away to dry on the stones beside her. I glimpsed her bare breasts as she reached an arm to do it; and the long golden back, divided by the taut little strip of dark blue from the long golden legs. There was no white bar on her skin, the breasts were the same colour as the rest; she must have tanned a lot like that. It had been done casually and naturally, but I made sure my eyes were looking out to sea when she lay flat again, turned towards us as before. Once more I was shocked: this was not just the latest clothes fashion, but behaviour years ahead of its time. I was also uncomfortably aware that she was staring at me, that a comparison was being invited – or a reaction, observed. After a few moments she shifted a little and moved her head to face the other way. I looked at her brown figure, then down at Julie; then lay on my back myself and felt for the hand of the girl beside me. Her fingers curled through mine, played, contracted. I closed my eyes. Darkness, both; the old wickedness of Greece.

But I was soon punished for my daydreaming. Out of nowhere, a minute or two later, there was an abrupt approaching roar. For a wild first second I thought it was something to do with Bourani. Then I realized it was a sound I had not heard since I had been on the island: a low-flying plane, a fighter by the sound of it. Julie and I sat up, June leant round on an elbow, her back to us. The plane was very low. It shot out from behind the Bourani cape, some four hundred yards to sea of it, and scorched like an angry hornet over the water towards the Peloponnesus. In a few seconds it had passed out of sight behind the headland to the west; but not before we had seen the American markings – or at least I had. Julie seemed more interested in her sister’s bare back.

June said, ‘What a cheek.’

‘He’ll probably be back, now he’s seen you like that.’

‘Don’t be such a prude.’

‘Nicholas is perfectly well aware of what beautiful bodies we both have.’

June turned to us then, on her elbows, a small pendant breast visible past the nearer bent arm. She was biting her lips. ‘I didn’t realize things had gone that far.’

Julie stared fixedly out to sea. ‘We are not amused.’

‘Nicholas seems to be.’

‘You’re showing off.’

‘Since he’s already had the divine good luck to see me –’

June.

Through all this little spat Julie hadn’t looked at me. But now she did, and made it clear whose side I was to be on. It was delicious: she was both embarrassed and piqued, like still water ruffled. She surveyed me reproachfully, as if it was all my fault.

‘Let’s go and look at the chapel.’

I glanced at June as I obediently stood, and received a sarcastic and impudent little cast skywards of her eyes. Now I had to bite my lips. Julie and I strolled away into the trees, the shade, in bare feet. There was a charming pinkness about her cheeks, and a setness of mouth.

‘She’s only teasing you.’

‘I could scratch her eyes out sometimes.’

‘A classicist shouldn’t be shocked by nakedness in Greece.’

‘I’m not a classicist at the moment. Just a girl who feels at a disadvantage.’

I leant and kissed the side of her head. I was pushed away, but without force.

We came to the whitewashed chapel. I thought it would be locked, as it had been when I had tried to get in before. But the primitive wooden latch gave – someone must have been there, and forgotten to relock the place. There was no window, only the light from the door. It was bare of chairs; an iron candle-holder with one or two ancient stumps on its spikes, a naively painted iconostasis spanning the far end, a very faint aroma of incense. We went and looked at the crudely figured saints on the worm-eaten wall of wood, but I knew we were both less aware of them than of the darkness and seclusion of the little place. I put an arm round her shoulders. A moment later she had turned and we were kissing. She twisted her mouth away and turned her cheek against my shoulder. I looked at the open door, then drew her back towards it; pushed it to, leant against the wall on the hinge side and coaxed her to me. I began to kiss her throat, her shoulder, then reached up to the straps of her costume.

‘No. You mustn’t.’

But her voice had that peculiar feminine tone that invites you to go on as much as to stop. I gently eased the straps off her shoulders, then down, till she was bare to the waist; caressed the waist, then up, slowly, to the firm small breasts, still a little damp from the sea-water, but warm, excited. I bent and licked the salt from the nipples. Her hands began to stroke down my back, in my hair. I let my own wander down to the waist again, to where the costume hung, but then her hands were abruptly on mine.

She whispered. ‘Please. Not yet.’

I brushed my lips against her mouth. ‘I want you so much.’

‘I know.’

‘You’re so beautiful.’

‘But we can’t. Not here.’

I moved my hands up to her breasts.

‘Do you want me to?’

‘You know I do. But not now.’

Her arms slipped round my neck and we kissed again, crushing each other. I slid a hand down her back, slipped the fingers inside the edge of the costume, appled a curved cheek, pulled her closer still, against the hardness in my loins, made sure she could feel it and know she was wanted. Our mouths twisted, our tongues explored wildly, she began to rock against me and I could sense she was losing control, that this nakedness, darkness, pent-up emotion, repressed need …

There was a sound. It was minute, and gave no indication of what had caused it. But it came beyond any doubt from the far end of, and inside, the chapel. We clung in petrified horror for a long second. Julie’s head twisted round to look where I was looking, but the few glints of light through the sides of the closed door made it difficult to see. Instinctively we both reached for her costume and slipped it back on over her arms. Then I gripped her hand, moved her against the wall beside me, and reached for the door. I jerked it open, light flooded in. The iconostasis stared at us, the black iron candlestand in front of it. There was nothing else. But I could see that the iconostasis, as in all such Greek chapels, stood some three or four feet off the back wall; and there was a narrow door at one end. Suddenly Julie was in front of me, mutely but violently shaking her head – she must have seen my instinct was to rush down there. I had guessed at once who it was: that accursed Negro. He could have sneaked in easily enough when we were swimming, and had probably assumed we would not leave the beach and the sea.

Julie pulled my hand urgently, casting a quick look back at the far end. I hesitated, then let her drag me out into the open air. I slammed the door shut, then looked at her.

‘The bastard.’

‘He can’t have known we were going in there.’

‘But he could damn well have warned us earlier.’

We spoke in whispers. She made me walk a few steps away. Beyond, in the sun, I could see June with her head raised, looking at us. She must have heard the sharp bang of the door.

Julie said, ‘Maurice will know for sure now.’

‘That no longer worries me. It’s about bloody time he did.’

June called. ‘Is something wrong?’

Julie raised a finger to her mouth. Her sister turned, sat up, put her bikini top on, then came to meet us.

‘Joe’s in there. Hidden.’

June looked past us at the white walls of the chapel, then at our faces – no longer teasing, but concerned.

Julie said, ‘I’m going to have it out with Maurice. Either Joe goes, or we do.’

‘I suggested that weeks ago.’

‘I know.’

‘Were you talking? Did he hear anything?’

Julie looked down. ‘It’s not that.’ Her cheeks were flushed. June gave me a sympathetic little smile, but had the grace to look down as well.

I said, ‘I’m only too happy to go in there and

But they were firmly against that. We walked back to our things and talked it over for a few minutes, covertly watching the chapel door. It stayed as it was, but somehow the place was spoilt now. That invisible black presence in the little building seeped into the landscape, the sunlight, the whole afternoon. I also felt a violent sexual frustration … but there was nothing now to be done about that. We decided to go back to the house.

There we found Maria sitting impassively outside her cottage, talking to the donkeyman, Hermes. She said tea was waiting for us, on the table. The two peasants stared at us from their wooden chairs, as if we were so remote from their simple world, so foreign, that all communication was impossible. But then Maria pointed mysteriously out to sea and said two or three words in Greek that I didn’t understand. We looked, but saw nothing.

Julie said, ‘She says a fleet of warships.’

We went to the edge of the gravel to the south of the house; and there, almost hull down, a line of grey ships steamed east across the Aegean between Malea and Skyli: a carrier, a cruiser, four destroyers, another ship, intent on some new Troy. The harsh irruption of the fighter plane into our peace was explained.

June said, ‘Perhaps it’s Maurice’s last trick. To bombard us to death.’

We laughed, but were held by those cloud-grey shapes on the world’s blue rim. Death machines holding thousands of gum-chewing, contraceptive-carrying men, for some reason more thirty years away than thirty miles; as if we were looking into the future, not the south; into a world where there were no more Prosperos, no private domaines, no poetries, fantasies, tender sexual promises … I stood between the two girls and felt acutely the fragility not only of the old man’s extraordinary enterprise, but of time itself. I knew I would never have another adventure like this. I would have sacrificed all the rest of my days to have this one afternoon endless, endlessly repeated, a closed circle, instead of what it was: a brief and tiny step that could never be retraced.

My previous euphoria waned further over the tea. The girls had gone indoors, then reappeared in their dresses of that morning. The yacht was due so soon, and there was a hurried confusion over all we said. They were in two minds over what they should do; there was even a moment when we talked of their coming back with me to the other side of the island – they could put up at the hotel. But in the end we decided to give Conchis one more chance, one last weekend to declare himself. We were still discussing that when something else out to sea caught my eye. It came round the headland from the direction of Nauplia.

They had told me about the yacht, how luxurious it was, how much proof, if any more were needed, that one thing the old man must be was rich. It still took my breath away a little. We all went again to the edge of the gravel, where we could see better. A two-master, it was moving very slowly, under engine power, its sails furled; a long white hull, cabins rising out of the deck both fore and aft. The Greek flag hung lazily at a small mast at the stern. I saw half a dozen blue and white figures, presumably the crew. It was too far out, nearly half a mile, to distinguish a face. I said, ‘Well. As prisons go … ‘

June said, ‘You should see below decks. There are eight brands of French scent on our cabin table.’

The yacht almost ceased to move. Three men were at a davit, getting ready to lower a small boat. A siren moaned, to be sure we knew of the arrival. I felt, in characteristic Engish fashion, both a stab of envy and a contempt. The yacht itself was not vulgar, but I smelt something vulgar about owning it. I also saw myself aboard it one day. Nothing in my life before had taken me into the world of the very rich – I had had one or two rich acquaintances at Oxford, people like Billie Whyte, but had never experienced their home backgrounds. I did envy the two girls then; it was easier for them, good looks were the only passports they needed to enter that world. Money-getting was a male thing, sublimated virility. Perhaps Julie sensed all this. At any rate, when we went back to the colonnade for them to collect their things, she suddenly caught my hand and drew me indoors out of June’s sight and hearing. ‘It’s only a few days.’ ‘Which are going to seem like a few years.’

‘And for me.’

I said, ‘I’ve been waiting to meet you all my life.’

She looked down, we were standing very close. ‘I know.’

‘Do you feel the same?’

‘I don’t know what I feel, Nicholas. Except that I want you to feel like that.’

‘If you come back, could you get away one evening during the week?’

She glanced round through the open doors, then into my eyes. ‘It’s not that I wouldn’t love to, but –’

‘I could make Wednesday. We could meet down by the chapel.’ I added, ‘Not in it.’

She appealed for understanding. ‘We may not even be here.’

‘I’ll come anyway. After dark. I’ll wait till midnight. It’ll be better than biting my fingernails in that damned school.’