The Magus - John Fowles [238]
Next I opened another envelope from London. Inside was my own letter to the Tavistock Repertory Company. Someone had done impatiently but exactly as I requested, and scrawled the name of June and Julie Holmes's agent across the bottom of the page in blue pencil. Then there was a letter from Australia. In it was a printed blackedged card with a blank space for the sender's name to be written in; a rather pathetically childlike hand had done so.
---------------------------------- R. I. P. _Mrs. Mary Kelly_ thanks you for your kind letter of condolence in her recent tragic bereavement. -----------------------------------
The last letter was from Ann Taylor: inside, a postcard and photographs. _We found these. We thought you might like copies. I've sent the negatives to Mrs. Kelly. I understand what you say in your letter, we must all feel to blame in different ways. The one thing I don't think Allie would want is that we take it hard, now that it won't do any good. I'm going home next week. I still can't believe it. I had to pack all her things and you can imagine. It seemed so unnecessary then, it made me cry again. Well, I suppose we must all get over it. I am going home next week, shall see Mrs. K. at the earliest possible time. Yours, Ann_ Eight bad snaps. Five of them were of me or of views; only three showed Alison. One of her kneeling over the little girl with the boil, one of her standing at the Oedipus crossroads, one of her with the muleteer on Parnassus. She was closest to the camera in the one at the crossroads, and she had that direct, half-boyish grin that somehow always best revealed her honesty... what had she called herself? Coarse salt; the candour of salt. I remembered how we had got in the car, how I had talked about my father, had even then only been able to talk to her like that because of _her_ honesty; because I knew she was a mirror that did not lie; whose interest in me was real; whose love was real. That had been her supreme virtue: a constant reality. I sat at my desk and stared at that face, at the strand of hair that blew across the side of the forehead, that one moment, the hair so, the wind so, still present and forever gone. Sadness swept back through me. I could not sleep. I put the letters and photographs in a drawer and went out again, along the coast. Far to the north, across the water, there was a scrub fire. A broken ruby-red line ate its way across a mountain; as a line of fire ate its way through me. What was I? Exactly what Conchis had had me told: nothing but the net sum of countless wrong turnings. Why? I dismissed most of the Freudian jargon of the trial; but all my life I had tried to turn life into fiction, to hold reality away; always I had acted as if a third person was watching and listening and giving me marks for good or bad behaviour--a god like a novelist, to whom I turned, like a character with the power to please, the sensitivity to feel slighted, the ability to adapt himself to whatever he believed the novelistgod wanted. This leechlike variation of the supergo I had created myself, fostered myself, and because of it I had always been incapable of acting freely. It was not my defence; but my despot. And now I saw it, I saw it a death too late. I sat by the shore and waited for the dawn to rise on the grey sea. Intolerably alone.
64
Whether it was in the nature of my nature, or in that of whatever Cone-method optimism Conchis had pumped into me during my last long sleep, I got progressively moroser as the day dawned. I was well aware that I had no evidence and no witnesses to present in support of the truth; and such a firm believer in logistics as Conchis would not have left his line of retreat unorganised. He must know that his immediate risk was that I should go to the police; in which case his move was obvious. I guessed that by now he and all the "cast" had left Greece. There would be no one to question, except people like Hermes, who was probably even more innocent than I suspected; the hotel clerk, who