The Magus - John Fowles [211]
way. There was a wrestling with legs, trying to fit them in as we faced each other. Splashing, leaning, trying to kiss--but it was a strain and we had to lie back. I thought of other baths shared: Alison. Of how all naked women become the same naked woman, the eternal naked woman; who could not die, who could only be celebrated as I was going, in an obscure way, to celebrate Alison in Julie; almost to mourn her as I remet and remade her. We began to touch each other's loins with our feet. Her toes; shy then inquisitive; the soft wet pelt, dark softness between the silk white thighs; her mysterious lust. A long silence. I made her turn round, so that she sat against me. There was a pretence of washing, of soaping and splashing; but mostly caressing, kissing, moulding, biting. Finally she stood up and out of the bath and we dried. She undid the scarf round her hair and it fell again. Her damp, warm body, the water gurgling away, the sense that the whole village was asleep--not only in that night, but in time, ten generations unable to understand the divinity, the paradise of sex. Not a man in the world I would have changed places with; or who would not have wanted to change places with me. She put her arms round me and kissed me, as if the bath had relieved all her tenseness; then whispered, "I haven't..." "It's all right." She went in to the bedroom and I got my coat and brought it into the bathroom and put on a contraceptive. When I came out she was lying on her side. I stood beside the bed, looking at her eyes, the eyes of her breasts, that body. I knelt to kiss it, but she twisted off the bed before I could stop her, with a little breath of laughter. There was more light, the moon must have come through a rift in the clouds. She stood over by the far window, as if waiting for me to catch her. I walked slowly towards her. Just before I got within reach, but was sure she was not going to move, she slipped sideways and pushed my arms down as I stretched to catch her. She stopped against the wall by the door. This fey game of tag was a kind of last acting of her role towards me: the uncatchable, the virgin temptress. It was too charmingly perverse, another attempt to be wicked, to really irritate; and too badly timed to really please. Now she stood, back to the wall, her arms out, hands pressed back, as if crucified. I smiled and stole closer, but she said in a low voice, "Don't move." She raised both her anns above her head, the backs of the wrists together, as if they were bound; and crossed her ankles, as if they were tied as well. Someone must have switched on a light in one of the houses behind the hotel, because a brighter, slatted light percolated the room; barred her body. She had a smile on her face. "Who am I?" It was a pose, a sexual guessing-game. "The slave?" "Cophetua." She covered her breasts and loins. "Eve?" "Now?" She put her hands behind her back and leant against the wall; looking at me shyly from under her eyebrows. I began to be tired of all this whimsy; I put my hands on the wall beside her head, caging her in. She looked down. "Her first love affaire." "Now be just you." "What is just me?" I took the ends of her hair and gently pinned her head back, went closer; she moved her hands from behind her back and rested them on my hips. I inched forward until I was pressing her against the wall. She put her bare feet on top of mine. I slipped my hands round her back. And we stood like that, touching noses, staring into each other's dark eyes, too close to focus. "I'm going to find out." "Are you?" A little smile at the corner of her mouth; the Leonardo smile again. I caught her to me and kissed her; she gave, then struggled wildly, so wildly that I half let go of her. I caught her back, but still she struggled; though it became a sex struggle, a falling across the end of the bed, rolling on top of each other, kisses begun and bite-ended, grapplings. I remembered an old Urfe law: that girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education. She seemed to want me to rape her. Her legs