The Magus (65 page)

Eight bad snaps. Five of them were of me or of views; only three showed Alison. One of her kneeling over the little girl with the boil, one of her standing at the Oedipus crossroads, one of her with the muleteer on Parnassus. She was closest to the camera in the one at the crossroads, and she had that direct, half-boyish grin that somehow always best revealed her honesty… what had she called herself? Coarse salt; the candour of salt. I remembered how we had got in the car, how I had talked about my father, had even then only been able to talk to her like that because of
her
honesty; because I knew she was a mirror that did not lie; whose interest in me was real; whose love was real. That had been her supreme virtue: a constant reality.

I sat at my desk and stared at that face, at the strand of hair that blew across the side of the forehead, that one moment, the hair so, the wind so, still present and for ever gone.

Sadness swept back through me. I could not sleep. I put the letters and photographs in a drawer and went out again, along the coast. Far to the north, across the water, there was a scrub fire. A broken ruby-red line ate its way across a mountain; as a line of fire ate its way through me.

What was I after all? Near enough what Conchis had had me told: nothing but the net sum of countless wrong turnings. I dismissed most of the Freudian jargon of the trial; but all my life I had tried to turn life into fiction, to hold reality away; always I had acted as if a third person was watching and listening and giving me marks for good or bad behaviour – a god like a novelist, to whom I turned, like a character with the power to please, the sensitivity to feel slighted, the ability to adapt himself to whatever he believed the novelist-god wanted. This leechlike variation of the super-ego I had created myself, fostered myself, and because of it I had always been incapable of acting freely. It was not my defence; but my despot. And now I saw it, I saw it a death too late.

I sat by the shore and waited for the dawn to rise on the grey sea.

Intolerably alone.

64

Whether it was in the nature of my nature, or in that of whatever Coue-method optimism Conchis had pumped into me during my last long sleep, I got progressively more morose as the day dawned. I was well aware that I had no evidence and no witnesses to present in support of the truth; and such a firm believer in logistics as Conchis would not have left his line of retreat unorganized. He must know that his immediate risk was that I should go to the police; in which case his move was obvious. I guessed that by now he and all the ‘cast’ had left Greece. There would be no one to question, except people like Hermes, who was probably even more innocent than I suspected; and Patarescu, who would admit nothing.

The only real witness was Demetriades. I could never force a confession out of him, but I remembered his sweet innocence at the beginning; and that there must have been a time, before I went to Bourani, when they had relied largely on him for information. As I knew from discussing students with him, he was not without a certain shrewdness of judgment, especially when it came to separating genuine hard workers from intelligent idlers. It enraged me to think what his more detailed report must have been on me. I wanted some sort of physical revenge on someone. I also wanted the whole school to know I was angry.

I didn’t go to the first lesson, reserving my spectacular re-entry into school life till breakfast. When I appeared there was the sudden silence you get when you throw a stone into a pool of croaking frogs; an abrupt hush, then the gradual resumption of noise. Some of the boys were grinning. The other masters stared at me as if I had committed the final crime. I could see Demetriades on the far side of the room. I walked straight towards him, too quickly for him to act. He half rose, then evidently saw what was coming and, like a frightened Peter Lorre, promptly sat down again. I stood over him.

‘Get up, damn you.’

He made a feeble attempt at a smile; shrugged at the boy next to him. I repeated my request, loudly, in Greek, and added a Greek jibe.

‘Get up – brothel-louse.’

There was a total hush again. Demetriades went red and stared down at the table.

He had in front of him a plate of pappy bread and milk sprinkled with honey, a dish he always treated himself to at breakfast. I reached forward and flipped it back in his face. It ran down his shirt and his expensive suit. He jumped up, flicking down with his hands. As he looked up in a red rage, like a child, I hit him where I wanted, plug in his right eye. It was not Lonsdale, but it landed hard.

Everyone got to their feet. The prefects shouted for order. The gym master rushed behind me and seized my arm, but I snapped at him that it was all right, it was all over. Demetriades stood like a parody of Oedipus with his hands over his eyes. Then without warning he whirled forwards at me, kicking and clawing like an old woman. The gym master, who despised him, stepped past me and easily pinned his arms.

I turned and walked out. Demetriades started to shout petulant curses I didn’t understand. A steward was standing in the door and I told him to bring coffee to my room. Then I sat there and waited.

Sure enough, as soon as second school began, I was summoned to the headmaster’s office. Besides the old man there was the deputy headmaster, the senior housemaster and the gym master; the latter, I presumed, in case I should cut up rough again. The senior housemaster, Androutsos, spoke French fluently and he was evidently there to be the translator at this court martial.

As soon as I sat down I was handed a letter. I saw by the heading that it was from the School Board in Athens. It was in French officialese ; dated two days before.

The Board of Governors of the Lord Byron School having considered the report submitted by the headmaster has regretfully decided that the said Board must terminate the contract with you under clause 7 of the said contract: Unsatisfactory conduct as teacher.

As per the said clause your salary will be paid until the end of September and your fare home will be paid.

There was to be no trying; only sentencing. I looked up at the four faces. If they showed anything it was embarrassment, and I could even detect a hint of regret on Androutsos’s; but no sign of complicity.

I said, ‘I didn’t know the headmaster was in Mr Conchis’s pay.’ Androutsos was obviously puzzled.
‘A la solde de qui?’
He translated what I angrily repeated; but the headmaster too seemed nonplussed. He was in fact far too dignified a figurehead, more like an American college president than a real headmaster, to make it likely that he would connive in an unjust dismissal. Demetriades had deserved his black eye even more than I suspected. Demetriades, Conchis, some influential third person on the Board. A secret report…

There was a swift conversation in Greek between the headmaster and his deputy. I heard the name Conchis twice, but I couldn’t follow what they said. Androutsos was told to translate.

‘The headmaster does not understand your remark.’

‘No?’

I grimaced menacingly at the old man, but I was already more than half persuaded that his incomprehension was genuine.

At a sign from the vice-master Androutsos raised a sheet of paper and read from it. ‘The following complaints were made against you. One: you have failed to enter the life of the school, absenting yourself almost every weekend during this last term.’ I began to grin. ‘Two: you have twice bribed prefects to take your supervision periods.’ This was true, though the bribery had been no worse than a letting them off compositions they owed me. Demetriades had suggested it; and only he could have reported it. ‘Three: you failed to mark your examination papers, a most serious scholastic duty. Four: you –’

But I had had enough of the farce. I stood up. The headmaster spoke; a pursed mouth in a grave old face.

‘The headmaster also says,’ translated Androutsos, ‘that your insane assault on a colleague at breakfast this morning has done irreparable harm to the respect he has always entertained for the land of Byron and Shakespeare.’

‘Jesus.’ I laughed out loud, then I wagged my finger at Androutsos. The gym master got ready to spring at me. ‘Now listen. Tell him this. I am going to Athens. I am going to the British Embassy, I am going to the Ministry of Education, I am going to the newspapers, I am going to make such trouble that

I didn’t finish. I raked them with a broadside of contempt, and walked out.

I was not allowed to get very far with my packing, back in my room. Not five minutes afterwards there was a knock on the door. I smiled grimly, and opened it violently. But the member of the tribunal I had least expected was standing there: the deputy headmaster.

His name was Mavromichalis. He ran the school administratively, and was the disciplinary dean also; a kind of camp adjutant, a lean, tense, balding man in his late forties, withdrawn even with other Greeks. I had had very little to do with him. The senior teacher of demotic, he was, in the historical tradition of his kind, a fanatical lover of his own country. He had run a famous underground news-sheet in Athens during the Occupation; and the classical pseudonym he had used then,
o Bouplix,
the oxgoad, had stuck. Though he always deferred to the headmaster in public, in many ways it was his spirit that most informed the school; he hated the Byzantine accidie that lingers in the Greek soul far more intensely than any foreigner could.

He stood there, closely watching me, and I stood in the door, surprised out of my anger by something in his eyes. He managed to suggest that if matters had allowed he might have been smiling. He spoke quietly.

‘Je veux vous
parler, Monsieur Urfe.’

I had another surprise then, because he had never spoken to me before in anything but Greek; I had always assumed that he knew no other language. I let him come in. He glanced quickly down at the suitcases open on my bed, then invited me to sit behind the desk. He took a seat himself by the window and folded his arms: shrewd, incisive eyes. He very deliberately let the silence speak for him. I knew then. For the headmaster, I was simply a bad teacher; for this man, something else besides.

I said coldly,
‘Eh bien?’

‘I regret these circumstances.’

‘You didn’t come here to tell me that.’

He stared at me. ‘Do you think our school is a good school?’

‘My dear Mr Mavromichalis, if you imagine – ‘

He raised his hands sharply but pacifyingly. ‘I am here simply as a colleague. My question is serious.’

His French was ponderous, rusty, but far from elementary.

‘Colleague … or emissary?’

He lanced a look at me. The boys had a joke about him: how even the cicadas stopped talking when he passed.

‘Please to answer my question. Is our school good?’

I shrugged impatiently. ‘Academically. Yes. Obviously.’

He watched me a moment more, then came to the point. ‘For our school’s sake, I do not want scandals.’

I noted the implications of that first person singular.

‘You should have thought of that before.’

Another silence. He said, ‘We have in Greece an old folksong that says, He who steals for bread is innocent, He who steals for gold is guilty.’ His eyes watched to see if I understood. ‘If you wish to resign … I can assure you that
Monsieur le Directeur
will accept. The other letter will be forgotten.’

‘Which
Monsieur le Directeur?’

He smiled very faintly, but said nothing; and would, I knew, never say anything. In an odd way, perhaps because I was behind the desk, I felt like the tyrannical interrogator. He was the brave patriot. Finally, he looked out of the window and said, as if irrelevantly, ‘We have an excellent science laboratory.’

I knew that; I knew the equipment in it had been given by an anonymous donor when the school was re-opened after the war and I knew the staff-room ‘legend’ was that the money had been wrung out of some rich collaborationist.

I said, ‘I see.’

‘ I have come to invite you to resign.’

‘As my predecessors did?’

He didn’t answer. I shook my head.

He tacked nearer the truth. ‘I do not know what has happened to you. I do not ask you to forgive that. I ask you to forgive this.’ He gestured: the school.

‘I hear you think I’m a bad teacher anyway.’

He said, ‘We will give you a good
recommandation.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

He shrugged. ‘If you insist…’

‘Am I so bad as that?’

‘We have no place here for any but the best.’

Under his oxgoad eyes, I looked down. The suitcases waited on the bed. I wanted to get away, to Athens, anywhere, to non-identity and non-involvement. I knew I wasn’t a good teacher. But I was too flayed, too stripped elsewhere, to admit it.

‘You’re asking too much.’ He waited in silence, implacably. ‘I’ll keep quiet in Athens on one condition. That he meets me there.’

‘Pas possible.’

Silence. I wondered how his monomaniacal sense of duty towards the school lived with whatever allegiance he owed Conchis. A hornet hovered threateningly in the window, then caroomed away; as my anger retreated before my desire to have it all over and done with.

I said. ‘Why you?’

He smiled then, a thin, small smile.
‘Avant la guerre.’

I knew he had not been teaching at the school; it must have been at Bourani. I looked down at the desk. ‘I want to leave at once. Today.’

‘That is understood. But no more scandals?’ He meant, after that at breakfast.

‘I’ll see. If… ‘I gestured in my turn. ‘Only because of this.’

‘Bien.’
He said it almost warmly, and came round the desk to take my hand; and even shook my shoulder, as Conchis had sometimes done, as if to assure me that he took my word.

Then, briskly and sparsely, he went.

And so I was expelled. As soon as he had gone, I felt angry again, angry that once again I had not used the cat. I did not mind leaving the school; to have dragged through another year, pretending Bourani did not exist, brewing sourly in the past … it was unthinkable. But leaving the island, the light, the sea. I stared out over the olive-groves. It was suddenly a loss like that of a limb. It was not the meanness of making a scandal, it was the futility. Whatever happened, I was banned from ever living again on Phraxos.

After a while I forced myself to go on packing. The bursar sent a clerk up with my pay cheque and the address of the travel agency I should go to in Athens about my journey home. Just after noon I walked out of the school gate for the last time.

I went straight to Patarescu’s house. A peasant-woman came to the door; the doctor had gone to Rhodes for a month. Then I went to the house on the hill. I knocked on the gate. No one answered; it was locked. Then I went back down through the village to the old harbour, to the taverna where I had met old Barba Dimitraki. Georgiou, as I hoped, knew of a room for me in a cottage near by. I sent a boy back to the school with a fish-trolley to get my bags; then ate some bread and olives.

At two, in the fierce afternoon sun, I started to toil up between the hedges of prickly pear towards the central ridge. I was carrying a hurricane lamp, a crowbar and a hacksaw. No scandal was one thing; but no investigation was another.