The Magus - John Fowles [154]
looked at me, expressionlessly, but most of the time he watched down the hill. Suddenly there was a whistle, a blown whistle, from the direction of the cliffs. The Negro waited a minute more, then walked away up past the statue and out of sight. I crossed the gulley and went fast down the hill to the place where we had sat. I had been reduced to the state when it was no longer a question of whether any story at Bourani could be absolutely believed, but of whether it could be absolutely disbelieved. I knew I wanted this one to be true, and that was dangerous. I still had some questions, and I was going to still watch her like a lynx. But my instinct told me I was a lynx moving into a landscape where the mists were rapidly thinning. Finding her at the rug again seemed a test of her truth. I came over the small rise, and there she was. She made a little concealed praying movement, gladness that I had come. She hadn't changed her clothes, but her hair was tied loosely back at the nape with a blue ribbon. "What was the whistle?" She whispered. "Maurice. He is here. He's gone now." She jumped up. "Come and look." She led me through the trees to the clifftop. I thought for a mad moment that she was going to show me Conchis's retreating back. But she stopped under the branches of the last pine and pointed. Right in the south, almost hull down, a line of ships steamed east across the Aegean between Malea and Skyli: a carrier, a cruiser, four destroyers, another ship, intent on some new Troy. I glanced down at her long pink skirt, her ridiculously oldfashioned shoes, and then back at those pale grey shapes on the world's blue rim. Thousands of gum-chewing, contraceptive-carrying men, more thirty or forty years away than thirty or forty miles, as if we were looking into the future, not into the south. She said, "Our being here. Their being there." I looked again at her profile; then to the distant fleet, and weighed them in the balance; made her the victress. "Tell me what's happened." We walked back through the trees. "I've told him that you're almost convinced now that I am in some way in his sinister power... that you don't really know whether it's hypnosis or schizophrenia or what. And that you're falling in love with me. All according to the script." "What did he say?" She sat down on the rug and looked up. "He wants us to meet during the week. Secretly. As if secretly." But she seemed worried. "The only thing is--he assured me that it was the last time I'd have to play a 'love' scene with you." A moment of silence. "The end of act one. His words." "And act two?" "I think next weekend he will want me to turn against you." "This meeting?" "He told me to try Wednesday. Do you know Moutsa? The little chapel?" "What time?" "Dusk. Half-past eight?" I nodded. She turned, a sudden vivacity. "I forgot to tell you. I think there's someone at your school who spies on you for Maurice. Another master?" "Oh?" "Maurice told us one day you were very standoffish with the other masters. That they didn't like you." I thought at once of Demetriades; of how, when I reflected, it was peculiar that such a gossip should have kept my trips to Bourani so secret. Besides, I was standoffish, and he was the only other master I was ever frequently with, or spoke to. I began my supplementary cross-examination. What did the sisters do during the week? They went to Athens or to Nauplia, to the yacht. Maurice ]eft them very much to their own devices. What about Foulkes and the girl? But I found that she knew nothing about them, though she had guessed from my face that evening that I had seen de Deukans. I asked what would have happened if I had gone into the music room that first Sunday. They had expected I would; she had had all her speeches, variations of those she had used the next weekend, ready. Where had June worked in England? At a publisher's. Had they discovered anything from "Apollo" and the other actor? Only that "they must not be frightened"--the man had left her as soon as they entered the trees. Who had held the torches? She thought Maria and Hermes.