The Magus, A Revised Version (15 page)

From this skull-rock strange golden roots throw

Ikons and incidents; the man in the mask

Manipulates. I am the fool that falls

And never learns to wait and watch,

Icarus eternally damned, the dupe of time …

He suggested we look over the rest of the house.

A door led into a bare, ugly hall. There was a dining-room, which he said he never used, on the north side of the house, and another room which resembled nothing so much as a second-hand bookshop; a chaos of books
–
shelves of books, stacks of books, piles of magazines and newspapers, and one large and evidently newly arrived parcel that lay unopened on a desk by the window.

He turned to me with a pair of calipers in his hand.

‘
I am interested in anthropology. May I measure your skull?
’
He took my permission for granted, and I bent my head. As he gently pinched it, he said,
‘
You like books?
’

He seemed to have forgotten, but perhaps he hadn
’
t, that I had read English at Oxford.

‘
Of course.
’

‘
What do you read?
’
He wrote down my measurements in a little notebook.

‘
Oh … novels mainly. Poetry. And criticism.
’

‘
I have not a single novel here.
’

‘
No?
’

‘
The novel is no longer an art form.
’

I grinned.

‘
Why do you smile?
’

‘
It was a sort of joke when I was at Oxford. If you didn
’
t know what to say at a party, you used to ask a question like that.
’

‘
Like what?
’

‘
“
Do you think the novel is exhausted as an art form?
”
No serious answer was expected.
’

‘
I
see. It was not serious.
’

‘
Not at all.
’
I looked at the notebook.
‘
Are my measurements interesting?
’

‘
No.
’
He dismissed that.
‘
Well
–
I am serious. The novel is dead. As dead as alchemy.
’
He cut out with his hands, with the calipers, dismissing that as well.
‘
I
realized that one day before the war. Do you know what I did? I burnt every novel I possessed. Dickens. Cervantes. Dostoievsky. Flaubert. All the great and all the small. I even burnt something I wrote myself when I was too young to know better. I burnt them out there. It took me all day. The sky took their smoke, the earth their ashes. It was a fumigation. I have been happier and healthier ever since.
’
I remembered my own small destroying; and thought, grand gestures are splendid
–
if you can afford them. He picked up a book and slapped the dust
off
it.
‘
Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?
’

‘
For fun?
’

‘
Fun!
’
He pounced on the word.
‘
Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.
’

I see.

‘
For this.
’
A life of Franklin Roosevelt.
‘
This.
’
A French paperback on astrophysics.
‘
This. Look at this.
’
It was an old pamphlet
–
An
Alar
m
e for Sinners, Containing the Last Words of the Murderer Robert
Foulkes, 1679.
‘
There, take that and read it over the weekend. See if it is not more real than all the historical novels ever written.
’

His bedroom extended almost the seaward width of the house, like the music-room below. At one end was a bed
–
a double bed, I noticed
–
and a huge wardrobe; at the other, a closed door led through into what must have been a very small room, a dressing-room perhaps. Near that door stood a strange-looking table, the top of which he lifted. It was (I had to be told) a clavichord. The centre of the room was fitted out as a kind of sitting-room and study. There was another tiled stove, and a desk littered with the papers he must have been working on, and two armchairs upholstered in pale brown to match a chaise-longue. In a far corner, a triangular cabinet full of pale-blue and green Isnik ware. Flooded with evening light, it was altogether a more homely room than the one downstairs, and by contrast pleasantly free of books.

But its tone was really set by its two paintings: both nudes, girls in sunlit interiors, pinks, reds, greens, honeys, ambers; all light, warmth, glowing like yellow fires with life, humanity, domesticity, sexuality, Mediterraneity.

‘
You know him?
’
I shook my head.
‘
Bonnard. He painted them both five or six years before he died.
’
I stood in front of them. He said, behind me,
‘
These, I paid for.
’

‘
They were worth it.
’

‘
Sunlight. A naked girl. A chair. A towel, a bidet. A tiled floor. A little dog. And he gives the whole of existence a reason.
’

I stared at the one on the left, not the one he had inventoried. It showed a girl by a sunlit window with her back turned, apparently drying her loins and watching herself in the mirror at the same time. I was remembering Alison, Alison wandering about the flat naked, singing, like a child. It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.

Conchis moved out on to the terrace, and I followed him. By the westward of the two french doors stood a small Moorish ivory-inlaid
table. It carried a bowl of flowers set, as if votively, before a photograph.

It was a large picture in an old-fashioned silver frame. A girl in an Edwardian dress stood by a vase of roses on an improbable Corinthian pedestal, while painted foliage drooped sentimentally across the background. It was one of t
hose old photographs whose dark
chocolate shadows are balanced by the creamy richness of the light surfaces; of a period when women had bosoms, not breasts. The young girl in the picture had a massed pile of light hair, and a sharp waist, and that plump-softness of skin and slightly heavy Gibson-girl handsomeness of feature that the age so much admired.

Conchis saw me giving it a lingering glance.
‘
She was once my
fiancée
.
’

I looked again. The photographer
’
s name was stamped floridly in gold across the bottom corner
–
a London address.

‘
You never married her?
’

‘
She died.
’

‘
She looks English.
’

‘
Yes.
’
He paused, surveying her. The girl seemed absurdly historical, standing by the pompous vase in front of the faded, painted grove.
‘
Yes, she was English.
’

I looked at him.
‘
What was your English name, Mr Conchis?
’

He smiled one of his rare smiles; like a monkey
’
s paw flashing out of a cage.
‘
I have forgotten.
’

‘
You never married at all?
’

He remained staring down at the photograph, then slowly shook his head.

‘
Come.
’

A table stood in the southeast corner of the parapeted L-shaped terrace. It was already laid with a cloth, presumably for dinner. We looked over the trees at the superb view, the vast dome of light over land and sea. The mountains of the Peloponnesus had turned a violet-blue, and Venus hung in the pale-green sky like a white lamp, with the steady soft brilliance of gaslight. The photo stood in the doorway, placed rather in the way children put dolls in a window to let them look out.

He sat against the parapet with his back to the view.

‘
And you? You are engaged?
’
In my turn I shook my head.
‘
You must find life here very lonely.
’

‘
I
was warned.
’

‘
A good-looking young man
of your
age.
’

‘
Well, there was a girl, but

‘
But?
’

‘
I can
’
t explain.
’

‘
Is she English?
’

I thought of the Bonnard; that was the reality; such moments; not what one could tell. I smiled at him.

‘
May I ask you what you asked me last week? No questions?
’

‘
Of course.
’

We sat in silence then, that same peculiar silence he had imposed on the beach the Saturday before. At last he turned to the sea and spoke again.

‘
Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.
’

‘
To live alone?
’

‘
To live. With what you are. A Swiss came to end his days here -many years ago now
–
in an isolated ruined cottage at the far end of the island. Over there, under Aquila. A man of my age now. He had spent all his life assembling watches and reading about Greece. He had even taught himself classical Greek. He repaired the cottage himself, cleared the cisterns, made some terraces. His passion became
–
you cannot guess
–
goats. He kept one, then two. Then a small flock of them. They slept in the same room as he did. Always exquisite. Always combed and brushed, since he was Swiss. He used to call here sometimes in spring and we would have the utmost difficulty in keeping his seraglio out of the house. He learnt to make excellent cheeses
–
they fetched good prices in Athens. But he was alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.
’

‘
What happened to him?
’

‘
He died in 1937. A stroke. They did not discover him till a fortnight later. By then all his goats were dead too. It was winter, so you see the door was fastened.
’

His eyes on mine, Conchis grimaced, as if he found death a joker. His skin clung very close to his skull. Only the eyes lived. I had the strange impression that he wanted me to believe
he
was death; that at any moment the leathery old skin and the eyes would fall, and I should find myself the guest of a skeleton.

Later we went back indoors. There were three other rooms on the north side of the first floor. One room he showed me only a glimpse of, a lumber-room. I saw crates pile
d high, and some furniture with
dust-covers on. Then there was a bathroom, and beside the bathroom, a small bedroom. The bed was made, and I saw my duffel bag lying on it. I had fully expected one locked room, the woman-of-the-glove
’
s room. Then I thought that she lived in the cottage
–
Maria looked after her, perhaps; or perhaps this room that was to be mine for the weekend was normally hers.

He handed me the seventeenth-century pamphlet, which I had left on a table on the landing.

‘
I usually have an aperitif downstairs in about half an hour. I will see you then?
’

‘
Of course.
’

‘
I
must tell you something.
’

‘
Yes.
’

‘
You have heard some disagreeable things about me?
’

‘
I only know one story about you and that seems very much to your credit.
’

‘
The execution?
’

‘
I told you last week.
’

‘
I
have a feeling that you have heard something else. From Captain Mitford?
’