The Magus - John Fowles [175]
52
I had another letter from England on Saturday. There was a small black eagle on the flap: Barclay's Bank. _DEAR MR. URFE,_ _Thank you for writing to me upon the recommendation of the Misses Holmes. I have pleasure in enclosing a form which I hope you will kindly fill in and return to me and also a small booklet with details of the special services we can offer overseas customers._ _Yours truly,_ _P. J. FEARN,_ _Manager_ I looked up from reading it into the eyes of the boy who sat opposite me at table, and gave him a small smile; the unsuppressed smile of the bad poker player. Half an hour later I was climbing through the windless forest to the central ridge. The mountains were reduced to a pale insubstantiality by the heat, and the islands to the east rose and trembled shimmeringly over the sea, a strange optical illusion, like spinning tops. On the central ridge I moved along to a place where there was shade and a view down over Bourani; and sat there for an hour, in limbo, with the death of Alison still dark inside me and the hope of Julie, Julie now confirmed as Julie, there below me in the south. Gradually, those last two days, I had begun to absorb the fact of Alison's death; that is, had begun to edge it out of the moral world into the aesthetic, where it was easier to live with. By this sinister elision, this slipping from true remorse, the belief that the suffering we have precipitated ought to ennoble _us_, or at least make us less ignoble from then on, to disguised self-forgiveness, the belief that suffering in some way ennobles _life_, so that the precipitation of pain comes, by such a cockeyed algebra, to equal the ennoblement, or at any rate the enrichment, of life, by this characteristically twentieth-century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from _aqua_ into _unda_, I dulled the pain of that accusing death; and hardened myself to say nothing of it at Bourani. I was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked likely to be high. Before I moved off I took out the headed Barclay's letter and read it again. It had the effect of making me feel more indulgent towards Conchis than I had intended to be. I saw no objection now to a few small last dissimulations--on both sides. It was like the first day. The being uninvited, unsure; the going through the gate, approaching the house in its silent sunlit mystery, going round the colonnade; and there too it was the same, the tea table covered in muslin. No one present. The sea and the heat through the arches, the tiled floor, the silence, the waiting. And although I was nervous for different reasons, even that was the same. I put my duffiebag on the cane settee and went into the music room. A figure stood up from behind the harpsichord. He had evidently been sitting on the music stool, reading a book, which he put down as soon as I appeared. "Nicholas." "Hello, Mr. Conchis." My voice was neutral. He came and shook my hand, gave me a scrutiny; the characteristic rapid movement of his head. "I am invited?" "Of course. Did I not say?" "I wasn't sure."