The Magus - John Fowles [214]
own, full of my things, stood in a corner. The wall against which the table stood was new-built of brick. It had a heavy wooden door in it. No handle, no spyhole, no keyhole, not even a hinge. I gave it a push, but it was bolted or barred outside. There was another triangular table in the corner--an oldfashioned washbowl, with a sanitary bucket underneath. I rummaged in my suitcase; a clean shirt, a change of underclothes, a pair of summer trousers. I saw my razor and shaving brush, and that reminded me that I had a clock of Sorts on my chin. I went and looked in the _memento mori_ mirror. At least two days' stubble. My face was strange to me; degraded and yet peculiarly indifferent. I sat on the bed, and stared at the death figure. Death figure, death cell. A sinister reason for the wonderful breakfast struck me. A mock execution was about the only indignity left to undergo. I began to walk up and down and to try to take command of the situation. Behind and beneath everything there was the vile and unforgivable, the ultimate betrayal, of me, of all finer instincts, by Lily. I started to think of her as Lily again, perhaps because her first mask--the Lily mask--now seemed truer than the second one. I tried to imagine what she really was. Obviously a consummate young actress, and consummately immoral into the bargain; because only a prostitute could have behaved as she did. A pair of prostitutes, because I saw that her sister, June, Rose, might well have been prepared to carry out that final abominable seduction. Probably they would have liked me to be thus doubly humiliated. All her story--her stories--had been lies; or groundbait. Those letters, forgeries. They could not make it so easy for me to trace her. In a grim flash I guessed: none of my post left the island unintercepted. And from that I leapt to the realisation that they must now know about Alison; because of course they would have intercepted letters coming to me as well. When Conchis had advised me to go back and marry Alison he must have known she was dead; Lily must have known she was dead. Then my mind plunged sickeningly, as if I had walked off the edge of the world. Forged cuttings about the sisters, forged cuttings... forged cuttings. Alison. I stared at my own dilated eyes in the mirror. Suddenly her honesty, her untreachery--her death--was the last anchor left. If she, if she... I was swept away. The whole of life became a conspiracy. I strained back through time to seize Alison, to seize her and to be absolutely sure of her. To seize a quintessential Alison beyond all her powers of love or hate. For a while I let my mind wander into a bottomless madness. Supposing _all_ my life that last year had been the very opposite of what Conchis so often said--so often, to trick me once again--about life in general. That is, the very opposite of hazard. The fiat in Russell Square... but I had got it by answering a chance advertisement in the _New Statesman_. Meeting Alison that very first evening... but I might so easily have not gone to the party, not have waited those few minutes... and Margaret, Ann Taylor, all of them... the hypothesis became top-heavy, and crashed. I stared at myself. They were trying to drive me mad, to brainwash me in some astounding way. But I clung to reality. I clung too, to something in Alison, something like a tiny limpid crystal of eternal nonbetrayal. Like a light in the darkest night. Like a teardrop. An eternal inability to be so cruel. And the tears that for a brief moment formed in my own eyes were a kind of bitter guarantee that she was indeed dead. They were not only tears for her, but also tears of rage at Conchis and Julie; at the certainty that they knew she was dead and were using this new doubt, this torturing possibility that could not be a possibility, to rack me. To perform on me, for some incomprehensible reason, a viciously cruel vivisection of the mind. As if they only wanted to punish me; and punish me; and punish me again. With no right; and nc reason. I sat with my hands clenched against my head. Fragments of things