The Magus - John Fowles [13]
did you write this?" "Read it." _I don't want to live any more, it said. 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 I 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, still watching me. "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 feel 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 to lunch. 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 guerrilla war of prestige and anti-prestige. He had been parachuted into Greece during the German Occupation, and he was very glib with his Xan's and his Paddy's 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 philhellefle in fashion--gentleman, scholar, thug--but he spoke with a secondhand accent and the clipped, sparse prepsehoolisms 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 demobilisation. It was absurd. I wanted information from him, not antipathy; soin the end I made an effort, 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. "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 damn beautiful, if you like that sort of thing. Birds and the bees, all that caper." "There's a village, isn't there?" He smiled grimly. "Old boy, your Greek village isn't like an English village. Masters' wives. Half a 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, I can tell you. There's one that you might say isn't, but I don't suppose you'll meet him." "Oh?" "Actually,