The Magus (33 page)

I felt a purr inside me. That one shadow of a wink had made all his deceptions hollow – and tolerable; it also allowed me to deceive in return.

‘On that level… of course. I understand.’

‘That is why I interrupted your
tete-a-tete.
She needs little setbacks, problems to overcome. As people with broken limbs need exercise.’ He said, And how did you find her, Nicholas?’

‘Very suspicious of me. As you said.’

‘But you managed … ?’

‘I was beginning to.’

‘Good. Tomorrow I am going to disappear. Or at least I shall lead her to believe that. You will have all day with her in apparent solitude. We will see what she makes of it.’

‘I’m delighted you trust me so much.’

He touched my arm. ‘I confess also that I did wish to provoke a somewhat excessive reaction in her. For your benefit. In case you had any remaining doubts about her abnormality.’

‘I have none now. Whatever.’

He inclined his head, and I grinned in my mind. We came to the tree, which was already on its side. He wanted it hacked into manageable lengths. Hermes would carry the wood to the house, I had only to pile it in readiness. He went off as soon as I started swinging the axe. I enjoyed the work much better than the previous time. The smaller stems were so dry and brittle that they broke at one stroke; and I felt each stroke was symbolic. Something more than wood was being hewn into manageable lengths. As I neatly stacked the branches, I felt I was also beginning to neatly stack the mystery of Bourani and Conchis. I was going to discover all about Julie, and I had already discovered the essential thing: that she was on my side. In some way he was using us as personifications of his irony, as his partners in exploring ambivalence. Every truth in his world was a sort of lie; and every lie a sort of truth. Like Julie I began, despite the traps and tricks and their seeming malice, to accept his fundamental benevolence. I remembered that smiling stone head he had shown me: his ultimate truth.

He was in any case far too intelligent to expect us not to see through the surface aspect of his masques; secretly he must want us to … and as for whatever deeper purpose, inner meaning they had, I was content to wait now.

Swinging the axe in the afternoon sun, enjoying the physical exercise, feeling in command again, thinking of midnight, tomorrow, Julie, the kiss, Alison forgotten, I was content to wait all summer if he wanted; and for the summer itself to wait all time.

44

She came towards us in the lamplight, towards the table in the southeast corner of the upstairs terrace. It was the antithesis of her first entrance there, the night I had formally met her as Lily. She wore almost the same clothes as that afternoon … the same white trousers, though she had changed into a white shirt, slightly loose-sleeved, as some sort of concession to evening formality. A coral necklace, the red belt and espadrilles; a hint of eye-shadow, a touch of lipstick. Conchis and I stood for her. She hesitated in front of me, then gave me a charged look, faintly desperate, staring.

‘I feel awful about this afternoon. Will you please forgive me?’

‘Forget it. It was nothing.’

She glanced then at Conchis, as if to see whether she had his approval. He smiled, indicated the chair between us. But she reached where her white shirt was buttoned and held out a sprig of jasmine.

‘A peace offering.’

I smelt it. ‘That’s sweet of you.’

She sat. Conchis poured her a cup of coffee, while I offered her a cigarette and then lit it. She seemed chastened, and carefully avoided my eyes after that first look.

Conchis said, ‘Nicholas and I have been discussing religion.’

It was true. He had brought a Bible to table, with two reference slips in it; and we had got on to God and no-God.

‘Oh.’ She stared down at her coffee, then raised the cup and sipped; but at the same time I felt a minute pressure on my foot, under the long table-cloth.

‘Nicholas calls himself an agnostic. But then he went on to say that he does not care.’

She raised her eyes politely at me. ‘No?’

‘More important things.’

She touched the small spoon in the saucer beside her cup. ‘I should have thought nothing was more important.’

‘Than one’s attitude to what one will never know? It seems to me a waste of time.’ I felt for her foot, but it had disappeared. She leant forward and picked up the box of matches I had left on the table between us, and shook out a dozen matchsticks on the white cloth.

‘Perhaps you’re afraid to think about God?’

She was not being natural, and I realized that this was some kind of pre-arranged scene … she was saying what Conchis wanted.

‘One can’t
think
about what cannot be known.’

‘You never
think
about tomorrow? About next year?’

‘Of course. I can make reasonable prophecies about them.’

She played with the matches, pushing them idly into patterns with her fingers. I watched her mouth, wished I could end the cold dialogue.

‘I can make reasonable prophecies about God.’

‘Such as?’

‘He is very intelligent.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I don’t understand Him. Why He is, who He is, or how He is. And Maurice tells me I am quite intelligent. I think God must be very intelligent to be so much more intelligent than I am. To give me no clues. No certainties. No sights. No reasons. No motives.’ She stared briefly up at me from her matches; her eyes had a kind of dry query that I recognized from Conchis.

‘Very intelligent – or very unkind?’

‘Very wise. If I prayed, I’d ask God never to reveal Himself to me. Because if He did I should know that He was not God. But a liar.’

Now she glanced at Conchis, who was facing out to sea; waiting for her, I thought, to finish her part of the act. But then I saw her forefinger silently tap the table twice. Her eyes flicked sideways again at Conchis and then back to me. I looked down. She had laid two matches diagonally across each other and two others beside them: XII. She avoided my suddenly comprehending eyes; and then, pushing the matchsticks into a little heap, she leant back out of the pool of light from the lamp and turned to Conchis. ‘You’re very silent, Maurice. Am I right?’

‘I sympathize with you, Nicholas.’ He smiled at me. ‘I felt very much as you do when I was older and more experienced than you are. Neither of us has the intuitive humanity of womankind, so we are not
to
blame.’ He said it quite without gallantry, as a simple statement. Julie would not meet my eyes. Her face was in shadow. ‘But then I had an experience that led me to understand what Julie has just said to you. Just then she paid us the compliment of making God male. But I think she knows, as all true women do, that all profound definitions of God are essentially definitions of the mother. Of giving things. Sometimes the strangest gifts. Because the religious instinct is really the instinct to define whatever gives each situation.’

He settled back in his chair.

‘I think I told you that when modern history – because that chauffeur stood for democracy, equality, progress – struck de Deukans down in 1922 I was abroad. I was in fact in the remote north of Norway, in pursuit of birds – or to be more exact, bird-sounds. You know perhaps that countless rare birds breed up there on the Arctic tundra. I am lucky. I have perfect pitch. I had by that time published one or two papers on the problems of accurately notating birds’ cries and songs. I had even begun a small scientific correspondence with men like Dr Van Oort of Leiden, the American A. A. Saunders, the Alexanders in England. So in the summer of 1922 I left Paris for three months in the Arctic.’

Julie shifted slightly and I felt another small pressure on my foot; a very soft, naked pressure. I was wearing sandals myself, and without distracting Conchis, I forced the heel of the left one against the ground until I was free of it; then felt a bare sole slide gently down the side of my own naked foot. Her toes curled and brushed the top of mine. It was innocent, but erotic. I tried to get my foot on top of hers, but this time the pressure was reproving. We could stay in contact, but no more. Meanwhile Conchis had gone on.

‘On my way north a professor at Oslo University told me of an educated farmer who lived in the heart of the vast fir-forests that run from Norway and Finland into Russia. It seemed this man had some knowledge of birds. He sent migration records to my professor, who had never actually met him. The fir-forest had several rare species I wanted to hear, so I decided to visit this farmer. As soon as I had ornithologically exhausted the tundra of the extreme north I crossed the Varangerfjord and went to the little town of Kirkenes. From there, armed with my letter of introduction, I set out for Seidevarre.

‘It took me four days to cover ninety miles. There was a road through the forest for the first twenty, but after that I had to travel by rowing-boat from isolated farm to farm along the river Pasvik. Endless forest. Huge, dark firs for mile after mile after mile. The river as broad and silent as a lake in a fairy-tale. Like a mirror unlooked-in since time began.

‘On the fourth day two men rowed me all day, and we did not pass a single farm or see a single sign of man. Only the silver-blue sheen of the endless river, the endless trees. Towards evening we came in sight of a house and a clearing. Two small meadows carpeted with buttercups, like slabs of gold in the sombre forest. We had arrived at Seidevarre.

‘Three buildings stood facing each other. There was a small wooden farmhouse by the water’s edge, half hidden among a grove of silver birches. Then a long turf-roofed barn. And a storehouse built on stilts to keep the rats out. A boat lay moored to a post by the house, and there were fishing nets hung out to dry.

‘The farmer was a smallish man with quick brown eyes – about fifty years old, I suppose. I jumped ashore and he read my letter. A woman some five years younger appeared and stood behind him. She had a severe but striking face, and though I could not understand what she and the farmer were saying I knew she did not want me to stay there. I noticed she ignored the two boatmen. And they in their turn gave her curious looks, as if she was as much a stranger to them as myself. Very soon she went back indoors.

‘However, the farmer bade me welcome. As I had been told, he spoke halting, but quite good, English. I asked him where he had learnt it. And he said that as a young man he had trained as a veterinary surgeon – and had studied for a year in London. This made me look at him again. I could not imagine how he had ended up in that remotest corner of Europe.

‘The woman was not, as I expected, his wife, but his sister-in-law. She had two children, both in their late adolescence. Neither the children nor their mother spoke any English, and without being rude, she made it silently clear to me that I was there against her choice. But Gustav Nygaard and I took to each other on sight. He showed me his books on birds, his notebooks. He was an enthusiast. I was an enthusiast.

‘Of course one of the early questions I asked concerned his brother. Nygaard seemed embarrassed. He said he had gone away. Then as if to explain and to stop any further questions, he said, “Many years ago.”

‘The farmhouse was very small and a space was cleared in the hayloft above the barn for my camp-bed. I took my meals with the family. Nygaard talked only with me. His sister-in-law remained silent. Her chlorotic daughter the same. I think the inhibited boy would have liked to join in, but his uncle could rarely be bothered to translate what we said. Those first days none of this little Norwegian domestic situation seemed important to me, because the beauty of the place and the extraordinary richness of its bird life overwhelmed me. I spent each day looking and listening to the rare duck and geese, the divers, the wild swans, that abounded in all the inlets and lagoons along the shore. It was a place where nature was triumphant over man. Not savagely triumphant, as one may feel in the tropics. But calmly, nobly triumphant. It is sentimental to talk of a landscape having a soul, but that one possessed a stronger character than any other I have seen, before or since. It ignored man. Man was nothing in it. It was not so bleak that he could not survive in it – the river was full of salmon and other fish and the summer was long and warm enough to grow potatoes and a crop of hay – but so vast that he could not equal or tame it. I make it sound forbidding, perhaps. However, from being rather frightened by the solitude when I first arrived at the farm, I realized in two or three days that I had fallen in love with it. Above all, with its silences. The evenings. Such peace. Sounds like the splash of a duck landing on the water, the scream of an osprey, came across miles with a clarity that was first incredible -and then mysterious because, like a cry in an empty house, it seemed to make the silence, the peace, more intense. Almost as if sounds were there to distinguish the silence, and not the reverse.

‘I think it was on the third day that I discovered their secret. The very first morning Nygaard had pointed out a long tree-covered spit of land that ran into the river some half a mile south of the farm, and asked me not to go on it. He said he had hung many nesting-boxes there and started a thriving colony of smew and goldeneye, and he did not want them disturbed. Of course I agreed, though it seemed late, even at that latitude, for duck to be sitting their eggs.

‘I then noticed that when we had our evening meal, we were never all present. On the first evening, the girl was away. On the second the boy appeared only when we had finished – even though I had seen him sitting gloomily by the shore only a few minutes before Nygaard came and called me to eat. The third day it so happened that I came back late myself to the farm. As I was walking back through the firs some way inland I stopped to watch a bird. I did not mean to hide, but I was hidden.’

Conchis paused, and I remembered how he had been standing two weeks before, when I left Julie; like a pre-echo of this.

‘Suddenly about two hundred yards away I saw the girl going through the trees by the shore. In one hand she held a pail covered with a cloth, in the other a milk-can. I remained behind a tree and watched her walk on. To my surprise she followed the shore and went on to the forbidden promontory. I watched her through glasses until I saw her disappear.

‘Nygaard disliked having to sit in the same room with both his relations and myself. Their disapproving silence irked him. So he took to coming with me when I went to my “bedroom” in the barn, to smoke a pipe and talk. That evening I told him I had seen his niece carrying what must have been food and drink on to the point. I asked him who was living there. He made no effort to hide the truth. The fact was this. His brother was living there. And he was insane.’

I glanced from Conchis to Julie and back; but neither of them showed any sign of noticing the oddness of this weaving of the past and the alleged present. I pressed against her foot. She returned the touch, but then moved her foot away. The story caught her, she was not to be distracted.

‘I asked at once if a doctor had ever seen him. Nygaard shook his head, as if his opinion of doctors, at least in this case, was not very high. I reminded him that I was a doctor myself. After a silence he said, “I think we are all insane here.” He got up then and went out. However, it was only to return a few minutes later. He had fetched a small sack. He shook its contents out on my camp-bed. I saw a litter of rounded stones and flints, of shards of primitive pottery with bands of incised ornament, and I knew I was looking at a collection of Stone Age articles. I asked him where he had found them. He said, at Seidevarre. And he then explained that the farm took its name from the point of land. That Seidevarre was a Lapp name, and meant “hill of the holy stone”, the dolmen. The spit had once been a holy place for the Polmak Lapps, who combine a fisher culture with the reindeer-herding one. But even they had only superseded far earlier cultures.

‘Originally the farm had been no more than a summer
dacha,
a hunting and fishing lodge, built by his father – an eccentric priest, who by a fortunate marriage had got enough money to indulge his multiple interests. A fierce old Lutheran pastor in one aspect. An upholder of the traditional Norwegian ways of rural life in another. A natural historian and scholar of some local eminence. And a fanatical lover of hunting and fishing – of returning to the wild. Both his sons had, at least in youth, revolted against his religious side. Henrik, the elder, had gone to sea, a ship’s engineer. Gustav had taken to veterinary work. The father had died, and left almost all his money to the Church. While staying with Gustav, who had by then begun to practise in Trondheim, Henrik met Ragna, and married her. I think he went to sea again for a short time, but very soon after his marriage he went through a nervous crisis, gave up his career, and retired to Seidevarre.