The Magus - John Fowles [151]
_course_." She stood up, and began to pace the little rug. "I know we were mad." She brushed the hair back from her cheeks, and looked down at me. "But you must realise that by that time we'd both fallen intellectually under his spell. He explained this thing as something, I don't know, so strange, so new. A fantastic extension of the Stanislavski method. He said you were to be like a man following a mysterious voice, voices, through a forest. A game withtwo tyrannesses and a victim. He gave us all sorts of parallels." "But where does it all lead?" "It's all connected--he says it's all connected--with what he told us at the end of the story about Seidevarre. About the need for a mystery in life? From the very beginning he assured us that at the end we should all drop our masks and he would ask us--you as well as us--lots of questions about what we felt during the experiment. Sometimes he gets very abstruse. You know, scientific and medical jargon." She smiled. "June says we're the best paid laboratory assistants in Europe." "But you still must have --" "Feared a fate worse than death? Not really. Partly because Maurice was so eager that we should do it. He said his whole life and happiness depended on it. At one point he even offered to give us a thousand pounds more each." She stood still, and stared down at me. "Arid never, never the smallest sign of what we were obviously looking for." "You said yes again?" "After a night of talking it over with June. A qualified yes." She sat down beside me and smiled. "You've no idea how sure we've been growing that you were helping him to deceive us. That was another thing." "It must have been obvious I was no actor." "It wasn't. I thought you were brilliant. Acting as if you couldn't act." She turned and lay on her stomach. "Well--we think the story about mystification was just another blind. According to the script we deceive you. But the deceiving deceives us even more." "This script?" "It doesn't help explain anything. Every week he tells us what we shall do next weekend. In terms of entries and exits. The sort of atmosphere to create. Sometimes lines. But he lets us improvise a lot. All along he says that if things go in some slightly different way it doesn't really matter. As long as we keep to the main development." "That talk about God the other night?" "They were lines I'd learnt." I looked down. "You started telling me all this because you're frightened." She nodded, but seemed for a moment at a loss for words. "To begin with there was no talk about getting you to fall in love with me except in a very distant nineteen-fifteeny sort of way. Then by that second week Maurice persuaded me that I had to make some compromise between my 1915 false self and your 1953 true one. He asked me if I'd mind kissing you." She shrugged. "One's kissed men onstage. I said, no, if it was absolutely necessary. That second Sunday I hadn't decided. That's why I put on that dreadful act." "It was a nice act." "That first conversation with you. I had terrible _trac_. Far worse than I've ever had on a real stage." "But you forced yourself to kiss me." "Only because I thought I had to." I followed the hollow of her arched back. She had raised one foot backwards in the air, and the skirt had fallen. The blue silk stocking finished just below the knee; a little piece of bare flesh. "And yesterday?" "It was in the script." Her hair clouded her face. "That's not an answer." She shook her hair back, gave me a quick look, less shy than I had hoped. "This other thing's so much more important. And I'm trying to explain." "Subject postponed." "First of all he must have known that sooner or later you and I would break down the barrier of pretences--I mean you said it that first night, we _are_ both English, the same sort of background. It was inevitable." She stopped, as if she did not want to bring up the next point. "Go on. And?" "He warned me last week that I mustn't get emotionally involved with you in any way." She stared at the ground in front of her. A blue butterfly hovered over us, moved on. "Did he