The Magus - John Fowles [160]
he watched. Then the torch went on again, but this time it pointed at a place in front of my feet, then moved towards the north. He was telling me to go home. "I am dismissed?" Again the torch pointed, swept sideways. I began to walk in the direction that would bring me to the path to the central ridge. He followed me, some thirty or forty yards behind. I halted and turned. "Is this really necessary?" But the torch flicked on again, and the beam pushed me away. I shrugged; continued. She loved me, she wanted me; and I carried the certainty of it inside me like alcohol. When we got to the path, and I turned up to the north, he stopped. Some forty yards later I looked back and he was still standing there. I went on without stopping for two hundred yards or so. It was a night with the thinnest of new moons; too dark to encourage a roundabout return to Bourani. I waited for the sound of a boat engine. And this time, in a few minutes, it came from the direction of the private beach; then headed east towards Nauplia. As I climbed the long path through the trees I thought of Julie; of her body, her mouth, a feeling that in another few minutes she would have given way... and my mind wandered lubriciously off to a Julie trained by familiarity, by love of me to do all those things that Alison did; all Alison's semi-professional skill with Julie's elegance, taste and intelligence. I was torn between wanting her and not wanting her; between doing things at my tempo and doing them at hers; happily torn. Walking on I began to think over the old centre to the whole enigma--Conchis, and his purposes. If you have a private menagerie your concern is to keep the animals in, not to dictate exactly what they do inside the cage. He constructed bars around us, subtle psychosexual bars that kept us chained to Bourani. He was like some Elizabethan nobleman. We were his Earl of Leicester's troupe, his very private company; but he might well have incorporated the Heisenberg principle into his masque, so that much of it was indeterminate, both to him as observer-voyeur and to us as observed human particles. One thing was certain: to use us so he must despise us. In spite of Julie's theory, it rankled in me that he called me unimaginative. I guessed that he partly wanted to taunt us with a false contrast between an all-wise Europe and a na� England. In spite of all his gnomic cant he was like so many other Europeans, quite unable to understand the emotional depths and subtleties of the English attitude to life. He thought the girls and I were green, innocents; but we could outperifidy his perfidy, and precisely because we were English: born with masks and bred to lie. I came towards the main ridge. As I walked I overturned a loose stone here and there, but otherwise the landscape was totally silent. Far below, over the crumpled grey velvet of the outstretched pinetops, the sea glistened obscurely under the spangled sky. The world belonged to night. The trees thinned out where the ground rose steeply to-the small bluff that marked the south side of the main ridge. I paused a moment for breath and turned to look back down towards Bourani; glanced at my watch. It was just after midnight. The whole island was asleep. Somewhere Lily was, like me, staring at the silver nailparing of a moon, perhaps feeling that same sense of existential solitude, the being and being alone in a universe, that still nights sometimes give. Then from behind me, from somewhere up on the ridge, I heard a sound. A very small sound, but enough to make me step swiftly off the path into the cover of a pine. Someone or something up there had overturned a stone. A pause of fifteen seconds or more. Then I froze; both with shock and as a precaution. A man was standing on top of the bluff, ashily silhouetted against the night sky. Then a second man, and a third. I could hear the faint noise of their feet on the rock, the muffled clink of something metallic. Then, like magic, there were six. Six grey shadows standing along the skyline. One of them raised an arm and pointed; but I heard no