The Magus - John Fowles [174]
Two of the pinks were still woven together. Three weeks. To my horror I began to cry. My tears did not last very long. I had no privacy. The bell for class rang, and Demetriades was tapping at my door. I brushed my eyes with the back of my wrist and went and opened it. I was still in pyjamas. "Eh! What are you doing? We are late." "I don't feel very well." "You look strange, my dear fellow." He put on a look of concern. I turned away, "Just tell the first lot to revise for the exam. And tell the others to do the same." "But --" "Leave me alone, will you?" "What shall I say?" "Anything." I shoved him out. As soon as the sounds of footsteps and voices had died down and I knew school had begun I pulled on my clothes and went out. I wanted to get away from the school, the village, from Bourani, from everything. I went along the north coast to a deserted cove and sat there on a stone and pulled out the cuttings again and reread them. June 29th. One of the last things she must have done was to post my letter back unopened. Perhaps the last thing. For a moment I felt angry with the other girl; but I remembered her, her flat, prim face, and her kind eyes. She wrote stilted English, but she would never deliberately leave anyone in the lurch; that sort never did. And I knew those two sides of Alison--the hard practical side that misled one into believing she could get over anything; and the other apparently rather histrionic Alison that one could never quite take seriously. In a tragic way these two sides had finally combined: there would have been no fake suicides with her, no swallowing a few tablets when she knew someone would come in an hour's time. But a weekend to die. It was not only that I felt guilty of jettisoning Alison. I knew, with one of those secret knowledges that can exist between two people, that her suicide was a direct result of my having told her of my own attempt--I had told it with a curt meiosis that was meant to conceal depths; and she had called my bluff one final time. _I don't think you know what sadness means_. I remembered those hysterical scenes in the Piraeus hotel; that much earlier "suicide note" she had composed, to blackmail me, as I then thought, just before I left London. I thought of her on Parnassus; I thought of her in Russell Square; things she said, she did, she was. And a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfisimess, settled on me. All those bitter home truths she had flung at me, right from the beginning... and still loved me; was so blind that she still loved me. One day she had said: _When you love me_ (and she had not meant "make love to me") _it's as if God forgave me for being the mess I am_; and I took it as a chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and so give me a sense of responsibility towards her. In a way her death was the final act of blackmail; but the blackmailed should feel innocent, and I felt guilty. It was as if at this moment, when I most wanted to be clean, I had fallen into the deepest filth; most free for the future, yet most chained to the past. And Julie; she now became a total necessity. Not only marriage with her, but confession to her. If she had been beside me then, I could have poured out everything, made a clean start. I needed desperately to throw myself on her mercy, to be forgiven by her. Her forgiveness was the only possible justification now. I was tired, tired, tired of deception; tired of being deceived; tired of deceiving others; and most tired of all of being self-tricked, of being endlessly at the mercy of my own loins; the craving for the best, that made the very worst of me. Those flowers, those intolerable flowers. My monstrous crime was Adam's, the oldest and most vicious of all male selfishnesses: to have imposed the role I needed from Alison on her real self. Something far worse than _l�-majest� _L�-humanit� What had she said about that muleteer? _I felt two packets fond of him_. And one death fond of me. When I got back that evening I wrote two letters, one to Ann Taylor, the other to Alison's