The Magus (43 page)

‘And you?’

‘I thought about my English one.’

‘What a pity we haven’t got costumes.’

Still she traced the backs of my fingers.

‘We didn’t last night.’

‘Is that a suggestion?’

She left a little pause. ‘June bet me I wouldn’t dare.’

‘We can’t let her get away with that.’

‘Just to swim.’

‘But only because … ?’

She said nothing for a moment, yet I could sense that she was smiling. Then she leant up and whispered in my ear.

‘Why do men always want to know in words?’

The next second she was on her feet and pulling me to mine. We went back to the beach. The red light floated on the side of the ghostly white yacht, shimmering a little in the water. There was a glint of light through the highest trees opposite us, from the house.

Someone there was still awake. I took the sides of her singlet and she raised her arms for me to peel it off; then turned her back for me to unhook her bra, while she fiddled at the side of her skirt. I slipped my hands to the front. The skirt fell. For a moment she rested back against me, and her hands covered mine, to still them, on the bare breasts. I kissed the curve of her neck. Then she was gone down towards the water, long-haired, a slim pale figure with a narrow white band around her waist; a nocturnal echo of her sister on the same beach, in the sun, three days before. I stripped off my clothes. Without looking back she waded in to her waist, then plunged forward with a small splash and began to swim, a breast-stroke, out towards the yacht. Haifa minute later I was beside her and we swam out together a little further. She stopped first, trod water, grinned at me -it was suddenly a jape, a little piece of daring achieved.

She began to speak in Greek, but not the Greek I knew; something much more archaic, less lisping, unelided.

‘What was that?’

‘Sophocles.’

‘What did it say?’

‘Just the sound.’ She said, ‘When I first arrived, I couldn’t believe it. Thousands and thousands of little black squiggles suddenly alive. Not past, but present.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Like someone who’s always lived in exile. But never realized it.’

‘I’ve felt that.’

‘Do you miss England at all?’

‘No.’

I saw her smile. ‘There must be something we don’t agree on.’

‘In some other life. Not this.’

‘I’m going to float. I’ve only just learnt how to do it.’

She extended her arms and floated on her back, like a child showing off. I swam a stroke or two closer. She lay with her eyes closed, a small smile on her lips, and her wet hair made her look younger. The sea was absolutely calm, like black glass.

‘You look like Ophelia.’

‘Shall I get me to a nunnery?’

‘I never felt less like Hamlet.’

‘Perhaps you’re the fool he advised me to marry.’

I smiled in the darkness. ‘Have you played her?’

‘At school. Just those scenes. Against a ghastly repressed lesbian girl who revelled in every minute of being in male drag.’

‘Right down to the codpiece?’

Her voice sank in reproach. ‘Mr Urfe! I thought you were above such vulgarity.’

I pushed myself a little closer still and kissed the side of her body, then attempted to peck up it; but was pushed away as she twisted and sank beneath the water again. There was a little struggle, a flurry of water, a splashing, as I tried to embrace her. I was allowed one fleeting pressure of her mouth, but then she had twisted away again and was doing her old-fashioned breast-stroke back towards the beach.

However, she slowed, as if the effort had exhausted her, when we came near the shore, and stood with the water up to her armpits. I stood beside her, our hands met again under the water, this time she let herself be drawn towards me, then my hands were on her waist. She raised her arms and put them round my neck, and then lowered her eyes as I gently explored under the water – the curves, the breasts, the armpits. I coaxed her closer still and felt the soles of her feet inch over the top of mine. Our bodies pressed, her face came up, the eyes closed, to meet mine. I eased a hand behind beneath the wet band of cloth round her hips, cupped the other round the side of a breast. It was cool, liquid, restrained in comparison to the fever of our nakedness in the chapel.

I had guessed, as she had talked, what was missing from her account of her abortive love affaire: the delicate balance in her of physical timidity and sensual imagination … the first must have made the man attractive to her initially, the second had condemned him when it came to the point – all of which gave her a genuinely nymphlike quality; one her sister, despite her playing of the part that night, lacked. This girl did quite literally flee the satyr and invite him on. There was a wild animal in her, but a true wild animal, intensely suspicious of wrong moves, of too obvious attempts to tame. She set little boundaries, almost like snares, to see if one understood – behaved, advanced, withdrew, as she wanted. Yet behind it all I foresaw an eventual place without boundaries, where she would one day allow me anything … and one day soon, for she clung to me now, succumbed, her femaleness against my maleness, and our tongues interlaced, aped what out loins wanted.

The silence, the dark water, the brilliant canopy of stars; and my sexual excitement, which she must have felt. Suddenly she turned her head away, almost with violence, though she still clung to me. After a moment I heard her whisper.

‘You poor thing. It’s not fair.’

‘I can’t help it. You excite me so much.’

‘I don’t want you to help it.’

She pulled away a little and a hand slipped down through the water between us. She brought me gently up, curled her fingers round me; timidly, with a return of that naivety she had shown earlier.

‘Poor little eel.’

‘With nowhere to swim.’

She began to brush and tease her fingers through the water; then whispered again.

‘Do you like me to do this?’

‘Idiot.’

She hesitated, then turned, slipped her right arm round my waist, while I put my left one over her shoulder and drew her close against my side. Her left hand felt lower, all round my loins, caressed, lifted and let fall, touched; then silked its way up the shaft, gripped, gently squeezed. The fingers seemed inexperienced, afraid of hurting. I slid my own free hand down and gave hers a little lesson, then left it, and raised her head, found her mouth. I began to lose all sense of everything around us. There was nothing but her tongue, her pressed nakedness, the wet hair, the gentle rhythm of the underwater hand. I would have had it go on all night, this being seduced that was also a seduction, this sudden conversion of the aloof, the fastidious, the voice that quoted Sophocles, into an obedient geisha, an adorable mermaid – though not physiologically the latter. I had shifted my own feet wider to stand more firmly, and one of her legs had curled round mine. The one little garment she wore was pressed very hard against my hip. I slid a hand down from the breast it was holding towards the place; but it was caught, discreetly returned to where it had left.

All night; but it was too erotic. She seemed to know by instinct that I no longer wanted her gentle; clung tighter still, began to show herself less of a novice; and as I racked quietly beneath the water, she bent her head and bit into the side of my armpit, as if she too had her orgasm, though only in the mind.

It was done. Her hand left me, then stroked gently up my stomach. I forced her round and kissed her, a little stunned by how complete and quick this descent from prudishness had been. I suspected that I had her sister’s teasing partly to thank for it; but something in Julie herself as well, perhaps always a secret willingness for something like this to happen. We stood clung together, as before, not needing to say anything, the final barrier between us broken. She kissed my skin softly; an unspoken promise.

‘I must go. June’s waiting up for me.’

One last quick kiss, then we swam a few strokes to where the beach shelved to land. Hand in hand to where our clothes lay. We didn’t bother to dry. She stepped into her skirt, twisted to fasten it. I kissed the wet breasts, then hooked her bra for her, helped her back into the singlet; was in turn helped to dress by her. We walked back along beside the water to Bourani, arms enlaced. I had an intuition it had meant more for her … it was a kind of discovery, or rediscovery, of her own latent sexuality, through the satisfaction of mine – and through the night, the warmth, the old magic of wild Greece. Her face seemed softer, simpler, maskless now. I also knew, with an inwardly crowning elation, that it had destroyed whatever last traces had remained of the suspicion Conchis had tried to sow between us. I needed no answers to my letters now. It might on the surface – or under the water – be a trivial little moment of wickedness, but it was a shared one, wanted on both sides; and a little to test that, I suddenly pulled her round as we walked. She turned and raised her mouth as eagerly as if she had been inside my mind and read my thoughts. All was transparent between us.

I accompanied her back inside the grounds, to within sight of the house. The light in the music-room was off, but I could see one in the back, in the window of the bedroom I used myself. Apparently another bed was brought in, she and June slept there when I was not visiting – and that seemed a perfect symbolic ending to the night, that she was going to sleep in ‘my’ bed. We had one last brief whispered discussion about the following weekend; but all that had receded now. The old man had been as good as his word, we had not been spied on, I was at last sanctioned as the Ferdinand to his salt-haired, clinging, warm-mouthed Miranda. Whatever happened, the summer ahead, all life ahead, was ours.

She kissed and left me, then after a few steps, turned quickly and ran back and kissed me once more. I waited until I saw her slip under the colonnade and disappear.

Though I felt tired, I walked the uphill path to the central crest quickly, to dry my damp clothes. I hardly thought about the day to come, the lack of sleep, the dread struggle to stay awake in class; all that was now tolerable. Julie entranced me. It was as if I had stumbled on a sleeping princess and found her, once woken, not merely in love with me, but erotically starved, deliciously eager to exorcize whatever sour and perverse lovemaking had gone on with her ill-starred choice of the previous year. I imagined a Julie who had acquired all Alison’s experience and adeptness, her quick passions, her slow lubricities, but enhanced, enriched, diversified by superior taste, intelligence, poetry … I kept smiling to myself as I walked. There was a thin new moon, the starlight, and I now knew almost by heart my way up through the ghostly, silent forest of Aleppo pines. I saw nothing in the present, only the endless seduction and surrender of that willing body: nights in the village house, indolent naked siestas on some shadowed bed … and when we were satiated, that other, golden, lapping presence, June, implicit two for the price of one. Of course it was Julie I loved, but all love needs a teasing, a testing dry relief.

I began to review the miracle-mystery that had brought us together – Conchis, and his purposes. If you have a private menagerie, your concern is to keep the animals in, not to dictate exactly what they do inside the cage. He constructed bars around us, subtle psycho-sexual bars that kept us chained to Bourani. He was like some Elizabethan nobleman. We were his Earl of Leicester’s troupe, his very private company; but he might well have incorporated the Heisen-berg principle into his ‘experiment’, so that much of it was indeterminate, both to him as observer-voyeur and to us as observed human particles. I guessed that he partly wanted to taunt us with a false contrast between an all-wise Europe and a callow England. In spite of all his gnomic cant he was like so many other Europeans, quite unable to understand the emotional depths and subtleties of the English attitude to life. He thought the girls and I were green, innocents; but we could outperfidy his perfidy, and precisely because we were English: born with masks and bred to lie.

I came towards the main ridge. As I walked I overturned a loose stone here and there, but otherwise the landscape was totally silent. Far below, over the crumpled grey velvet of the outstretched pine-tops, the sea glistened obscurely under the spangled sky. The world belonged to night.

The trees thinned out where the ground rose steeply to the small bluff that marked the south side of the main ridge. I paused a moment for breath and turned to look back down towards Bourani; glanced at my watch. It was just after midnight. The whole island was asleep. Under the silver nailparing of a moon, I felt, though without any melancholy at all, that sense of existential solitude, the being and being alone in a universe, that still nights sometimes give.

Then from behind me, from somewhere up on the ridge, I heard a sound. A very small sound, but enough to make me step swiftly off the path into the cover of a pine. Someone or something up there had overturned a stone. A pause of fifteen seconds or more. Then I froze; both with shock and as a precaution.

A man was standing on top of the bluff, ashily silhouetted against the night sky. Then a second man, and a third. I could hear the faint noise of their feet on the rock, the muffled clink of something metallic. Then, like magic, there were six. Six grey shadows standing along the skyline. One of them raised an arm and pointed; but I heard no sound of voices. Islanders? But they hardly ever used the central ridge in summer; and never at that time of night. In any case I suddenly realized what they were. They were soldiers. I could just see the indistinct outlines of guns, the dull sheen of a helmet.

There had been Greek army manoeuvres on the mainland a month before, and a coining and going of landing-craft in the strait. These men must be on some similar commando-type exercise. But I didn’t move.

One of the men turned back, and the others followed. I thought I knew what had happened. They had come along the central ridge and overshot the transverse path that led down to Bourani and Moutsa. As if to confirm my guess there was a distant pop, like a firework. I saw, from somewhere west of Bourani, a shimmering Very light hanging in the sky. It was one of the starshell variety and fell in a slow parabola. I had fired dozens myself, on night exercises. The six were evidently on their way to ‘attack’ some point on the other side of Moutsa.