The Magus (4 page)

‘Nice girl, dear boy.’

‘Oh … ‘ I shrugged. ‘You know.’

‘Attractive.’

‘Cheaper than central heating.’

‘I’m sure.’

But I knew what he was thinking.

Alison was very silent after we left him. We were driving up to Hampstead to see a film. I glanced at her sullen face. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Sometimes you sound so mean, you upper-class Poms.’ ‘I’m not upper-class. I’m middle-class.’ ‘Upper, middle – God, who cares.’ I drove some way before she spoke again. ‘You treated me as if I didn’t really belong to you.’ ‘Don’t be silly.’ ‘As if I’m a bloody abo.’ ‘Rubbish.’

‘In case my pants fell down or something.’

‘It’s so difficult to explain.’

‘Not to me, sport. Not to me.’

One day she said, ‘I’ve got to go for my interview tomorrow.’

‘Do you want to go?’

‘Do you want me to go?’

‘It doesn’t mean anything. You haven’t got to make up your mind.’

‘It’ll do me good if I get accepted. Just to know I’m accepted.’

She changed the subject; and I could have refused to change the subject. But I didn’t.

Then, the very next day, I too had a letter about an interview. Alison’s took place – she thought she had done well. Three days later she received a letter saying that she had been accepted for training, to start in ten days’ time.

I had my own examination from a board of urbane officials. She met me outside and we went for an awkward meal, like two strangers, in an Italian restaurant. She had a grey, tired face, and her cheeks looked baggy. I asked her what she’d been doing while I was away.

‘Writing a letter.’

‘To them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Saying?’

‘What do you think I said?’

‘You accepted.’

There was a difficult pause. I knew what she wanted me to say, but I couldn’t say it. I felt as a sleepwalker must feel when he wakes up at the end of the roof parapet. I wasn’t ready for marriage, for settling down. I wasn’t psychologically close enough to her; something I couldn’t define, obscure, monstrous, lay between us, and this obscure monstrous thing emanated from her, not from me.

‘Some of their flights go via Athens. If you’re in Greece we can meet. Maybe you’ll be in London. Anyway.’

We began to plan how we would live if I didn’t get the job in Greece.

But I did. A letter came, saying my name had been selected to be forwarded to the school board in Athens. This was ‘virtually a formality’. I should be expected in Greece at the beginning of October.

I showed Alison the letter as soon as I had climbed the stairs back to the flat, and watched her read it. I was looking for regret, but I couldn’t see it. She kissed me.

‘I told you.’

‘I know.’

‘Let’s celebrate. Let’s go out into the country’.

I let her carry me away. She wouldn’t take it seriously, and I was too much of a coward to stop and think why I was secretly hurt by her refusing to take it seriously. So we went out into the country, and when we came back we went to see a film and later went dancing in Soho; and still she wouldn’t take it seriously. But then, late, after love, we couldn’t sleep, and we had to take it seriously.

‘Alison, what am I going to do tomorrow?’

‘You’re going to accept.’

‘Do you want me to accept?’

‘Not all over again.’

We were lying on our backs, and I could see her eyes were open. Somewhere down below little leaves in front of a lamp-post cast nervous shadows across our ceiling.

‘If I say what I feel about you, will you

‘I know what you feel.’

And it was there: an accusing silence.

I reached out and touched her bare stomach. She pushed my hand away, but held it. ‘You feel, I feel, what’s the good. It’s what
we
feel. What you feel is what I feel. I’m a woman.’

I was frightened; and calculated my answer.

‘Would you marry me if I asked you?’

‘You can’t say it like that.’

‘I’d marry you tomorrow if I thought you really needed me. Or wanted me.’

‘Oh Nicko, Nicko.’ Rain lashed on the windowpanes. She beat my hand on the bed between us. There was a long silence.

‘I’ve just got to get out of this country.’

She didn’t answer; more silence, and then she spoke.

‘Pete’s coming back to London next week.’

‘What will he do?’

‘Don’t worry. He knows.’

‘How do you know he knows?’

‘I wrote to him.’

‘Has he answered?’

She breathed out. ‘No strings.’

‘Do you want to go back to him?’

She turned on her elbow and made me turn my head, so that our faces were very close together.

‘Ask me to marry you.’

‘Will you marry me?’

‘No.’ She turned away.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘To get it over. I’m going to be an air hostess, and you’re going to Greece. You’re free.’

‘And you’re free.’

‘If it makes you happier – I’m free.’

The rain came in sudden great swathes across the tree-tops and hit the windows and the roof; like spring rain, out of season. The bedroom air seemed full of unspoken words, unformulated guilts, a vicious silence, like the moments before a bridge collapses. We lay side by side, untouching, effigies on a bed turned tomb; sickeningly afraid to say what we really thought. In the end she spoke, in a voice that tried to be normal, but sounded harsh.

‘I don’t want to hurt you and the more I … want you, the more I shall. And I don’t want you to hurt me and the more you don’t want me the more you will.’ She got out of bed for a moment. When she came back she said, ‘We’ve decided?’

‘I suppose.’

We said no more. Soon, too soon, I thought, she went to sleep.

In the morning she was determinedly gay. I telephoned the Council. I went to receive Miss Spencer-Haigh’s congratulations and briefings, and took her out for a second and – I prayed – last lunch.

5

What Alison was not to know – since I hardly realized it myself -was that I had been deceiving her with another woman during the latter part of September. The woman was Greece. Even if I had failed the board I should have gone there. I never studied Greek at school, and my knowledge of modern Greece began and ended with Byron’s death at Missolonghi. Yet it needed only the seed of the idea of Greece, that morning in the British Council. It was as if someone had hit on a brilliant solution when all seemed lost. Greece – why hadn’t I thought of it before? It sounded so good:
‘I’m going to Greece.’ I
knew no one – this was long before the new Medes, the tourists, invaded – who had been there. I got hold of all the books I could find on the country. It astounded me how little I knew about it. I read and read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.

It seemed almost a secondary thing, by the time I left, that I wanted to escape from England. I thought of Alison only in terms of my going to Greece. When I loved her, I thought of being there with her; when I didn’t, then I was there without her. She had no chance.

I received a cable from the school board confirming my appointment, and then by post a contract to sign and a courteous letter in atrocious English from my new headmaster. Miss Spencer-Haigh produced the name and address in Northumberland of a man who had been at the school the year before. He hadn’t been appointed by the British Council, so she could tell me nothing about him. I wrote a letter, but that was unanswered. Ten days remained before I was due to go.

Things became very difficult with Alison. I had to give up the flat in Russell Square and we spent three frustrating days looking for somewhere for her to live. Eventually we found a large studio-room off Baker Street. The move, packing things, upset us both. I didn’t have to go until October 2nd, but Alison had already started work, and the need to get up early, to introduce order into our life, was too much for us. We had two dreadful rows. The first one she started, and stoked, and built up to a white-hot outpouring of contempt for men, and me in particular. I was a snob, a prig, a twopenny-halfpenny Don Juan – and so on. The next day – she had been icily mute at breakfast – when I went in the evening to meet her, she was not there. I waited an hour, then I went home. She wasn’t there, either. I telephoned: no air-hostess trainees had been kept late. I waited, getting angrier and angrier, until eleven o’clock, and then she came in. She went to the bathroom, took Her coat off, put on the milk she always had before bed, and said not a word.

‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘I’m not going to answer any questions.’

She stood over the stove in the kitchen recess. She had insisted on a cheap room. I loathed the cooking-sleeping-everything in one room; the shared bathroom; the having to hiss and whisper.

‘I know where you’ve been.’

‘I’m not interested.’

‘You’ve been with Pete.’

‘All right. I’ve been with Pete.’ She gave me a furious dark look. ‘So?’

‘You could have waited till Thursday.’

‘Why should I?’

Then I lost my temper. I dragged up everything I could remember that might hurt her. She didn’t say anything, but undressed and got into bed, and lay with her face turned to the wall. She began to cry. In the silence I kept remembering, with intense relief, that I should soon be free of all this. It was not that I believed my own accusations ; but I still hated her for having made me make them. In the end I sat beside her and watched the tears trickle out of her swollen eyes.

‘I waited hours for you.’

‘I went to the cinema. I haven’t seen Pete.’

‘Why lie about it?’

‘Because you can’t trust me. As if I’d do that.’

‘This is such a lousy way to end.’

‘I could have killed myself tonight. If I’d had the courage, I’d have thrown myself under the train. I stood there and thought of doing it.’

‘I’ll get you a whisky.’ I came back with it and gave it to her.

‘I wish to God you’d live with someone. Isn’t there another air hostess who’d—’

‘I’m never going to live with another woman again.’

‘Are you going back to Pete?’

She gave me an angry look.

‘Are you trying to tell me I shouldn’t?’

‘No.’

She sank back and stared at the wall. For the first time she gave a faint smile. The whisky was beginning to work. ‘It’s like those Hogarth pictures. Love
a la mode.
Five weeks later.’

‘Are we friends again?’

‘We can’t ever be friends again.’

‘If it hadn’t been you, I’d have walked out this evening.’

‘If it hadn’t been you I wouldn’t have come back.’

She held out her glass for more whisky. I kissed her wrist, and went to fetch the bottle.

‘You know what I thought today?’ She said it across the room.

‘No.’

‘If I killed myself, you’d be pleased. You’d be able to go round saying, she killed herself because of me. I think that would always keep me from suicide. Not letting some lousy shit like you get the credit.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘Then I thought I could do it if I wrote a note first explaining why I did it.’ She eyed me, still unmollified. ‘Look in my handbag. The shorthand pad.’ I got it out. ‘Look at the back.’

There were two pages scrawled in her big handwriting.

‘When did you write this?’

‘Read it.’

I don’t want to live any more. I spend most of my life not wanting to live. The only place I am happy is here where we’re being taught, and I have to think of something else, or reading books, or in the cinema. Or in bed. I’m only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist. I can’t remember having been happy for two or three years. Since the abortion. All I can remember is forcing myself sometimes to look happy so if I catch sight of my face in the mirror I might kid myself for a moment I really am happy.

There were two more sentences heavily crossed out. I looked up into her grey eyes.

‘You can’t mean this.’

‘I wrote it today in coffee-time. If I’d known how to quietly kill myself in the canteen I’d have done it.’

‘It’s … well, hysterical.’

‘I
am
hysterical.’ It was almost a shout.

‘And histrionic. You wrote it for me to see.’

There was a long pause. She kept her eyes shut.

‘Not just for you to
see.’

And then she cried again, but this time in my arms. I tried to reason with her. I made promises: I would postpone the journey to Greece, I would turn down the job – a hundred things that I didn’t mean and she knew I didn’t mean, but finally took as a placebo.

In the morning I persuaded her to ring up and say that she wasn’t well, and we spent the day out in the country.

The next morning, my last but two, came a postcard with a Northumberland postmark. It was from Mitford, the man who had been on Phraxos, to say that he would be in London for a few days, if I wanted to meet him.

I rang him up on the Wednesday at the Army and Navy Club and asked him out for a drink. He was two or three years older than myself, tanned, with blue staring eyes in a narrow head. He had a dark young—officer moustache which he kept on touching, and he wore a dark-blue blazer, with a regimental tie. He reeked mufti; and almost at once we started a guerilla war of prestige and anti-prestige. He had been parachuted into Greece during the German occupation, and he was very glib with his Xans and his Paddys and the Christian names of all the other well-known
condottieri
of the time. He had tried hard to acquire the triune personality of the philhellene in fashion -gentleman, scholar, thug – but he spoke with a second-hand accent and the clipped, sparse prep-schoolisms of a Viscount Montgomery. He was dogmatic, unbrooking, lost off the battlefield. I managed to keep my end up, over pink gins: I told him my war had consisted of two years’ ardent longing for demobilization. It was absurd. I wanted information from him, not antipathy; so in the end I confessed I was a regular army officer’s son, and asked him what the island looked like.

He nodded at the food-stand on the bar in the pub where we’d met. ‘There’s the island.’ He pointed with his cigarette. ‘That’s what the locals call it.’ He said some word in Greek. ‘The Pasty. Shape, old boy. Central ridge. Here’s your school and your village in this corner. All the rest of this north side and the entire south side deserted. That’s the lie of the land.’

‘The school?’

‘Best in Greece, actually.’

‘Discipline?’ He stiffened his hand karate-fashion.

‘Teaching problems?’

‘Usual stuff.’ He preened his moustache in the mirror behind the bar; mentioned the names of two or three books.

I asked him about life outside the school.

‘Isn’t any. Island’s quite pretty, if you like that sort of thing. Birds and the bees, all that caper.’

‘And the village?’

He smiled grimly. ‘Old boy, your Greek village isn’t like an English one. Absolute bloody dump socially. Masters’ wives. Haifa dozen officials. Odd pater and mater on a visit.’ He raised his neck, as if his shirt collar was too tight. It was a tic; made him feel authoritative. ‘A few villas. But they’re all boarded up for ten months of the year.’

‘You’re not exactly selling the place to me.’

‘It’s remote. Let’s face it, bloody remote. And you’d find the people in the villas pretty damn dull, anyway. There’s one that you might say isn’t, but I don’t suppose you’ll meet him.’

‘Oh?’

‘Actually, we had a row and I told him pretty effing quick what I thought of him.’

‘What was it all about?’

‘Bastard collaborated during the war. That was really at the root of it.’ He exhaled smoke. ‘No – you’ll have to put up with the other beaks if you want chat.’

‘They speak English?’

‘Most of ‘em speak Frog. There’s the Greek chap who teaches English with you. Cocky little bastard. Gave him a black eye one day.’

‘You’ve really prepared the ground for me.’

He laughed. ‘Got to keep ‘em down, you know.’ He felt his mask had slipped a little. ‘Your peasant, especially your Cretan peasant, salt of the earth. Wonderful chaps. Believe me. I know.’

I asked him why he’d left.

‘Writing a book actually. Wartime experiences and all that. See my publisher.’

There was something forlorn about him; I could imagine him briskly dashing about like a destructive Boy Scout, blowing up bridges and wearing picturesque off-beat uniforms; but he had to live in this dull new welfare world, like a stranded archosaur. He went hurriedly on.

‘You’ll piss blood for England. Be worse for you, with no Greek. And you’ll drink. Everyone does. Have to.’ He talked about
retsina
and
aretsinato, reiki
and
ouzo –
and then about women. ‘The girls in Athens are strictly O.O.B. Unless you want the pox.’

‘No talent on the island?’

‘Nix, old boy. Women are about the ugliest in the Aegean. And anyway – village honour. Makes that caper highly dangerous. Shouldn’t advise it. Discovered that somewhere else once.’ He gave me a curt grin, with the appropriate hooded look in his eyes.

I drove him back towards his club. It was a bronchial mid-afternoon, already darkening, the people, the traffic, everything fish-grey. I asked him why he hadn’t stayed in the Army.

‘Too damn orthodox, old boy. Specially in peacetime.’

I guessed that he had been rejected for a permanent commission; there was something obscurely wild and unstable about him, under the mess mannerisms.

We came to where he wanted to be dropped off.

‘Think I’ll do?’

His look was doubtful. ‘Treat ‘em tough. It’s the only way. Never let ‘em get you down. They did the chap before me, you know. Never met him, but apparently he went bonkers. Couldn’t control the boys.’

He got out of the car.

‘Well, all the best, old man.’ He grinned. ‘And listen.’ He had his hand on the door-handle. ‘Beware of the waiting-room.’

He closed the door at once, as if he had rehearsed that moment. I opened it quickly and leant out to call after him. ‘The
what?

He turned, but only to give a sharp wave. The Trafalgar Square crowd swallowed him up. I couldn’t get the smile on his face out of my mind. It secreted an omission; something he’d saved up, a mysterious last word. Waiting-room, waiting-room, waiting-room; it went round in my head all that evening.