The Magus - John Fowles [178]
me play my clavichord." I followed him indoors and upstairs. He went to the little table and lifted the lid revealing the keyboard underneath. I sat by his closed desk, watching the Bonnards. He began to play. Those Bonnards, their eternal outpouring of a golden happiness, haunted me; they were like windows on a world I had tried to reach all my life, and failed; they had reminded me of Alison, or rather of the best of my relationship with Alison, before; and now they bred a kind of Watteau-like melancholy in me, the forevergoneness of pictures like _L'Embarcation pour Cythere_. As if Bonnard had captured a reality so real that it could not exist; or only as a dream, a looking back and seeing where the way was lost and if it had not been lost but it had been lost... then I thought of Julie. One day I should see her so, naked at a sunlit window; my naked wife. I turned to glance at her photo by the window, and realised that it wasn't there; or anywhere else in the room. It hadn't just been moved, but removed. The small muted notes of the clavichord barely filled the room. It was clipped, fluttering, with whimpering vibratos, remotely plangent. He played a series of little Elizabethan almans and voltas. Then a Bach-like _gigue_. Finally, a small set of variations; each variation ended in the same chanting silvery chorus. He came to an end and looked round at me. "I liked that last one." Without a word he played the chorus again. "Byrd. But the tune is much older. It is called Rosasolis. The English archers sang it at Agincourt." He shut the clavichord, and turned with a smile that was of dismissal; once again manipulating my exits and entries. "Nicholas, I have much to attend to. I must ask you to leave me in peace for an hour or so." I stood up. "No work?" "You wish to work?" "No." "Then we will meet for _ouzo_." I thought that perhaps he wanted me to go out of doors, that Julie would be waiting there. So I went down. In the music room I saw that the other photo of Lily had also disappeared. I strolled idly all round the domaine, in the windless air; I waited in all the likely places; I kept on turning, looking backwards, sideways, listening. But the landscape seemed dead. Nothing and no one appeared. The theatre was empty; and, like all empty theatres, it became in the end frightening. We silently toasted each other, across the lamplit table with the ouzo and the olives, under the colonnade. Apparently we were to have dinner there that night, for the other table, laid for two, had been placed at the western end of the colonnade, looking out over the trees. I stood beside Conchis at the front steps. A breath of dead air washed over us. "I hoped you would tell me more about previous years here." He smiled. "In the middle of a performance?" "I thought this was a sort of interval." "There are no intervals here, Nicholas." He took my arm. "After dinner I am going to tell you the story of the execution. And now I am going to tell you what happened when I returned to France. After Seidevarre. If you are interested?" "Of course." He gestured with his glass. "Let us stroll as far as the seat. It will be cooler." We went down the steps and across the gravel into the trees. As we walked, he talked. "It took me many months to learn how much I had changed. As one learns of a distant earthquake by the imperceptible shakings of a needle on a seismograph. I gradually came to understand that I was really by nature a very different person from what I had previously imagined. I had, you remember, many new notes on bird sounds to collate and work through. But I found that I had no real interest in the subject after all. That in fact I preferred the mystery of birds' voices to any scientific explanation of them. Something analogous happened in every department of my life. When I looked back I saw that there had always been a discord in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued the latter, worshipped the latter, as a doctor, and as a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and classify it