The Magus - John Fowles [19]
me. But they were moments of sexual frustration, not regretted love. One day I thought: if I wasn't on this island I should be dropping this girl. The writing of the letters had become as often as not more of a chore than a pleasure, and I didn't hurry back to my room after dinner to write them--I scribbled them off hurriedly in class and got a boy to run down to the gate at the last minute to give them to the school postman. At half-term I went with Demetriades to Athens. He wanted to take me to his favourite brothel, in a suburb. He assured me the girls were clean. I hesitated, then.-- isn't it a poet's, to say nothing of a cynic's, moral duty to be immoral?--I went. When we came out of it, it was raining, and the shadowing wet leaves on the lower branches of a eucalyptus, caught under a light in the entrance, made me remember our bedroom in Russell Square. But Alison and London were gone, dead, exorcised; I had cut them away from my life. I decided I would write a letter to Alison that night, to say that I didn't want to hear from her again. I was too drunk by the time we got back to the hotel, and I don't know what I would have said. Perhaps, that I had proved beyond doubt that I was not worth waiting for; perhaps that she bored me; perhaps that I was lonelier than ever--and wanted to stay that way. As it was, I sent her a postcard telling her nothing; and on the last day I went back to the brothel alone. But the Lebanese nymphet I coveted was taken and I didn't fancy the others. December came, and we were still writing letters. I knew she was hiding things from me. Her life, as she described it, was too simple and manless to be true. When the final letter came, I was not surprised. What I hadn't expected was how bitter I should feel, and how betrayed. It was less a sexual jealousy of the man than an envy of Alison; moments of tenderness and togetherness, moments when the otherness of the other disappeared flooded back through my mind for days afterwards, like sequences from some cheap romantic film that I certainly didn't want to remember, but did; and there was the read and reread letter; and that such things could be ended so, by two hundred stale, worn words. _DEAR NICHOLAS,_ _I can't go on any more. I'm so terribly terribly sorry if this hurts you. Please believe that I'm sorry, please don't be angry with me for knowing you will be hurt. I can see you saying, I'm not hurt._ _I got so terribly lonely and depressed. I haven't told you how much, I can't tell you how much. Those first days I kept up such a brave front at work, and then at home I collapsed._ _I'm sleeping with Pete again when he's in London. It started two weeks ago. Please please believe me that I wouldn't be if I thought... you know. I know you know. I don't feel about him as I used to do, and don't begin to feel about him as I felt about you, you can't be jealous._ _It's just that he's so uncomplicated, he stops me thinking, he stops me being lonely, I've sunk back into all the old Australians-in-London thing again. We may marry. I don't know._ _It's terrible. I still want to write to you, and you to me. I keep on remembering._ _Goodbye._ _ALISON_ _You will be different for me. Always. That very first letter I wrote the day you left. If you could only understand._ I wrote a letter in reply to say that I had been expecting her letter, that she was perfectly free. But I tore it up. I realised that if anything might hurt her, silence would. I wanted to hurt her.
8
I was hopelessly unhappy in those last few days before the Christmas holidays. I began to loathe the school irrationally; the way it worked and the way it was planted, blind and prisonlike, in the heart of the divine landscape. When Alison's letters stopped, I was also increasingly isolated in a more conventional way. The outer world, England, London, became absurdly and sometimes terrifyingly unreal. The two or three Oxford friends I had kept up a spasmodic correspondence with sank beneath the horizon. I used to hear the B. B. C. Overseas Service from time to time, but the news broadcasts