The Magus - John Fowles [120]
thing, the shared orgasm. Her mistaking that for love, her not seeing that love was something other the mystery of withdrawal, reserve, walking away through the trees, turning the mouth away at the last moment. On Parnassus of all mountains, I thought, her unsubtlety, her inability to hide behind metaphor, ought to offend me; to bore me as uncomplex poetry normally bored me. And yet in some way I couldn't define she had, had always had, this secret trick of slipping through all the obstacles I put between us; as if she were really my sister, had access to unfair pressures and could always evoke deep similarities to annul, or to make seem shallow, the differences in taste or feeling. She began to talk about being an air hostess; about herself. "Oh Jesus, excitement. That lasts about a couple of duties. New faces, new cities, new romances with handsome pilots. Most of the pilots think we're part of the aircrew amenities. Just queueing up to be blessed by their miserable old Battle-of-Britain cocks." I laughed. "Nicko, it's not funny. It destroys you. That bloody tin pipe. And all that freedom, that space outside. Sometimes I just want to pull the safety handle and be sucked out. Just falling, a minute of wonderful lonely passengerless falling..." "You're not serious." She looked back. "More serious than you think. We call it charm depression. When you get so penny-in-the-slot charming that you stop being human any more. It's like... sometimes we're so busy after take-off we don't realise how far the plane's climbed and you look out and it's a shock... it's like that, you suddenly realise how far you are from what you really are. Or you were, or something. I don't explain it well." "Yes you do. Very well." "You begin to feel you don't belong anywhere any more. You know, as if I didn't have enough problems that way already. I mean England's impossible, it becomes more _honi wit qui_ smelly pants every day, it's a graveyard. And Australia... Australia. God, how I hate my country. The meanest ugliest blindest..." she gave up. We walked on a way, then she said, "It's just I haven't roots anywhere any more, I don't belong anywhere. They're all places I fly to or from. Or over. I just have people I like. Or love. They're the only homeland I have left." She threw a look back, a shy one, as if she had been saving up this truth about herself, this rootlessness, homelandlessness, which she knew was also a truth about me. "At least we've got rid of a lot of useless illusions as well." "Clever us." She fell silent and I swallowed her reproach. In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling. All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone--had only to be touched to adhere to what touched her. She stopped. We both noticed it at the same time. Below us to our right, the sound of water, a lot of water. "I'd love to bathe my feet. Could we get down?" We struck off the path through the trees and after a while came on a faint trail. It led us down, down and finally out into a clearing. At one end was a waterfall some ten feet or so high. A pooi of limpid water had formed beneath it. The clearing was dense with flowers and butterflies, a tiny trough of green-gold luxuriance after the dark forest we had been walking through. At the upper edge of the clearing there was a little cliff with a shallow cave, outside which some shepherd had pleached an arbour of fir branches. There were sheep droppings on the floor, but they were old. No one could have been there since summer began. "Let's have a swim." "It'll be like ice." "Yah." She pulled her shirt over her head, and unhooked her bra, grinning at me in the flecked shadow of the arbour; I was cornered again. "The place is probably alive with snakes." "Like Eden." She stepped out of her jeans and her white pants. Then she reached up and snapped a dead cone off one of the arbour branches and held it out to me. I watched her run nakedly through the long grass to the pool, try the water, groan. Then she waded forwards and swanned in