The Magus - John Fowles [155]
Maria? As ungiving as a stone. What did she think of the story of Conchis's life? Like me, she could only half believe it. What did her mother think? They'd told her they were still rehearsing... "she'd only get into a useless tizzy." How long did the contracts last? Till the end of October. I suddenly saw a new possibility--that when term ended Conchis might invite me to spend my holidays at Bourani, a limitless black and gold stretch of masque. "Mitford. You know he's a mess, you said so. But you never met him." "Maurice. He described him to us." All through the questions she kept her eyes solemnly on mine. "And what happened last year?" "No. Except that it was a failure of some kind." I produced my last and key question. "That theatre at Canonbury." "The Tower?" "Yes. Isn't there a little pub round the corner where people go afterwards? I've forgotten its name." I had; but I knew if she told it to me, I would remember. "The Beggar's Broom?" She seemed delighted. "Do you know it?" I thought of a warm-armed Danish girl called Kirsten; a brown bar with people's signatures scrawled on the ceiling. "Not really. But I'm so glad you do." Our eyes met, amused and relieved that the test was passed. "You were beginning to frighten me as much as Maurice." I lay back. The hot wind fretted the branches. "Don't you want to frighten me now?" She shook her head; lay back as well, and we stared up at the sky through a long silence. Then she said, "Tell me about Nicholas." So we talked about Nicholas: his family, his ambitions and his failings. The third person was right, because I presented a sort of ideal self to her, a victim of circumstances, a mixture of attractive raffishness and essential inner decency. I wanted to kill Alison off in her mind, and confessed to a "rather messy affaire" that had made me leave England. "The girl you were going to meet?" "It was cowardice. You know, letters... being lonely here. I told you. I ought never to have let it drag on so long. It could never have come to anything." I gave her an edited version of the relationship; one in which Alison got less than her due and I got a good deal more; but in which the main blame was put on hazard, on fate, on elective affinity, the feeling one had that one liked some people and loved others. "If I hadn't been here... would you have gone and met her?" "Probably." She looked pensive. "Shouldn't I have said that?" She nodded. "It's just that I can't stand dishonesty in personal relationships." "Nor can I. That's why I've broken off this other thing." She sat up and smoothed down her skirt. "I think I shall go wild somethnes. All this sun and sea and never being able to really enjoy it. How women lived fifty years ago in these miserable..." But she looked at me, saw by my eyes I wasn't listening, and stopped. I said, "How long have we got?" "Till four." "What happens then?" "You must go." "I want to kiss you." She was silent. Then she said quietly, "Don't you want to know about the real me?" "If you lie back." So she turned and lay flat on her stomach again, with her head pillowed on her arms. She talked about her mother, their life in Dorset, her own boredom with it; about her scholarship to Cambridge, acting, and finally, about the man in the photograph. He had been a don, a mathematician, at Sidney Sussex. Fifteen years older than Julie; married and separated; and they had had not an affaire, but a relationship "too peculiar and too sad to talk about." I asked what made it so sad. "Physical things." She stared into the ground, chin on arms. "Being too similar. One day I realised we were driving each other mad. Torturing each other instead of helping each other." "Was he cut up?" "Yes." "And you?" "Of course." She looked sideways. "I loved him." Her tone made me feel crass, and I let the silence come before I spoke again. "No one else?" "No one who matters." After a moment or two she turned round on her back, and spoke at the sky. "I think intelligence is terrible. It magnifies all one's faults. Complicates things that ought to be simple." "One can learn to simplify."