The Magus - John Fowles [11]
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 lamppost 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 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 treetops 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 realised 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 mediaeval 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