The Magus - John Fowles [149]
Lebanon. But then he said the salary." She sat up, turned her still amazed face to me. "Five thousand between us--plus a hundred pounds a month each for expenses." "But you must still have smelt a rat?" "Of course we did." She smiled. "You were funny that day... 'a rat five feet eight inches long'..." she looked shyly at me, picked at the nap of the rug, went on. "Well, we were driven home--in a Rolls-Royce--to think it over. You know, to a top flat in Belsize Park. Like Cinderellas. That's where he was so clever, he put so little direct pressure on us. Never the shadow of the shadow of a false move on his part. We saw him several times more. He took us out. Theatre. Opera. Never an attempt to get either of us on our own. And... well, I don't know what you really feel about him, but he is rather a marvellous old man. And even though he frightens us now, I still..... anyway." "What did everybody think? I mean, your friends--this producer man?" "They thought we ought to make enquiries. So we went to an agent and he found this film company does exist. It makes films mainly for the Arab market. Egypt." "What's it called?" "Polymus Films." She spelt it. "It's in whatever they list film companies in--the trade directory. Perfectly respectable." "And you said yes." "And in the end we said yes." She looked tentatively at me, as if she did not expect me to believe her; such gullibility. "We had got to know him better by then. So we thought." "Your mother?" "Oh Maurice saw to that. He insisted on having her up to London and bowled her over with his gentlemanliness." She added ruefully, "And his money." "This film?" "The story was taken from a demotic Greek novel that's never been translated. By a writer called Theodorakis--have you ever heard of him? _Three Hearts?_" I shook my head. "It was written in the nineteen twenties. It's about two English girls, they're supposed to be the ambassador's daughters, who go for a holiday on a Greek island during the First World War and meet a Greek poet there--a dying genius--and they both fall in love with him and he falls in love with them and at the end everyone's terribly miserable and they all renounce each other... exactly." She answered my grimace. "But actually when Maurice told it it had a sort of _Dame aux Cam�as_ charm." "You've read it?" "Bits of it." I spoke in Greek. "_Xerete kale ta nea ellenika?_" She answered, in a more fluent and much better accented demotic than my own, "If one knows ancient Greek it is a help, but the two languages are very different." She gave me a steady look, and I touched my forehead. "In London he showed us a long typewritten synopsis. And told us the script was being written in Athens. Our agent thought it was all perfectly normal." She tore a loose thread from the side of her skirt. "Only we even suspect him now. We think Maurice may have bribed him. To make us less suspicious." "An agent would hardly --" "Wouldn't he? Do you know the slang word for them? Flesh peddlers." "Maurice did pay you?" "As soon as we signed the contracts." She delved in the bag, then swivelled round so that we were sitting facing in opposite directions. She came out with a wallet; produced two cuttings from it. One showed the two sisters standing in a London street, in overcoats and woollen hats, laughing. I knew the paper by the print but it was in any case gummed on to a grey cuttings agency tag: _Evening Standard, January 8, 1953_. The paragraph underneath ran: AND BRAINS AS WELL! Two lucky twins, June and Julie (on right) Holmes, who will star in a film this summer to be shot in Greece. The twins both have Cambridge degrees, acted a lot at varsity, speak eight languages between them. Unfair note for bachelors: neither wants to marry yet. "We didn't write the caption." "So I guessed." The other cutting was from the _Cinema Trade News_. It repeated, in Americanese, what she had just told me. "Oh and this. My mother." She showed me a snapshot from the wallet; a woman with fluffy hair in a deckchair in a garden, a dumber spaniel beside her. I could see another photo and I made