The Magus - John Fowles [112]
desire; at last in my life, to be able to be so faithful. By an unhappy irony the way to the restaurant I took her to lay through the redlight area of the Piraeus. Bars, multilingual neon signs, photos of strippers and belly dancers, sailors in lounging groups, glimpses through bead curtains of Lautrec-like interiors, women in lines along the padded benches. The streets were thronged with pimps and tarts, barrowboys selling pistachios and sunflower pips, chestnut sellers, pasty sellers, lottery-ticket hawkers. Doormen invited us in, men slid up with wallets of watches, packets of Lucky Strikes and Camels, shoddy souvenirs. And every ten yards someone whistled at Alison. We walked in silence. I had a vision of Lily walking through that street, and silencing everything, purifying everything; not provoking and adding to the vulgarity. Alison had a set face, and we started to walk quickly to get out of the place; but I thought I could see in her walk a touch of that old amoral sexuality, that quality she could not help offering and other men, noticing. Yet I had chosen the Piraeus; and I even chose that road to the restaurant. When we got to Spiro's, she said, too brightly. "Well, brother Nicholas, what are you going to do with me?" 'Do you want to call it off?" She twirled her glass of _ouzo_. "Do you?" "I asked first." "No. Now you." "We could do something. Go somewhere you haven't seen." To my relief she'd already told me that she had spent a day in Athens earlier that summer; had done the sights. "I don't want to do a tourist thing. Think of something no one else ever does. Somewhere we shall be fairly alone." She added quickly, "Because of my job. I hate people." "How's your walking?" "I'd love to. Where?" "Well, there's Parnassus. Apparently it's a very easy climb. Just a long walk. We could hire a car. Go on to Delphi afterwards." "Parnassus?" She frowned, unable to quite place it. "Where the muses dash about. The mountain." "Oh, Nicholas!" A flash of her old self; the headlong willingness to go. Our _barbounia_ came and we started eating. She suddenly became overvivacious, overexcited by the idea of climbing Parnassus, and she drank glass for glass of _retsina_ with me; did everything that Lily would never have done; then called, in her characteristic way, her own bluff. "I know I'm trying too hard. But you make me like that." "If --" "Nicko." "Alison, if only you --" "Nicko, listen. Last week I was in my old room in the flat. The first night. And I could hear footsteps. Upstairs. And I cried. Just as I cried in the taxi today. Just as I could cry now but I'm not going to." She smiled, a little twisted smile. "I could even cry because we keep using each other's names." "Shouldn't we?" "We never did. We were so close we didn't have to. But what I'm trying to say is... all right. But please be kind to me. Don't always sit so in judgment on everything I say, everything I do." She stared at me and forced me to look her in the eyes. "I can't help being what I am." I nodded, looked sorry and touched her hand to mollify her. The one thing I did not want was a row; emotion, the past, this eternal reattachment to the past. After a moment she bit her mouth and the small grins we exchanged then were the first honest looks since we had met. I said good night to her outside her room. She kissed me on the cheek, and I pressed her shoulders as if, really, it was a far, far better thing that I did then than woman could easily imagine.
39
By half-past eight we were on the road. We drove over the wide mountains to Thebes, where Alison bought herself some stronger shoes and a pair of jeans. The sun was shining, there was a wind, the road empty of traffic, and the old Pontiac I had hired the night before still had some guts in its engine. Everything interested Alison--the people, the country, the bits in my 1909 Baedeker about the places we passed. Her mixture of enthusiasm and ignorance, which I remembered so well from London, didn't really irritate me any more. It seemed part of her energy, her candour; her companionability. But I had,