The Magus - John Fowles [245]
(let alone poetic) than to view the detective story as the most important literary genre, instead of what it really was, one of the least. On Moutsa, at that first sight of the party, I had felt, in spite of everything, a shock of excitement; and an equally revealing disappointment when I realised they were nothing: mere tourists. Perhaps that was my deepest resentment of all against Conchis. _Not that he had done what he did, but that he had stopped doing it_. I had intended to break into the house as well, to wreak some kind of revenge there. But suddenly that seemed petty and mean; and insufficient; because it was not that I still did not intend to have my revenge. Only now I saw quite clearly how I would have it. The school could dismiss me. But nothing could prevent my coming to the island the following summer. And then we would see who had the last laugh. I got up and left the Earth, and went to the house; walked one last time under the colonnade. The chairs were gone, even the bell. In the vegetable garden the cucumber plants lay yellowed and dying; the Priapus had been removed. I was full of a multiple sadness, for the past, for the present, for the future. Even then I was not waiting only to say, to feel, goodbye, but fractionally in the hope that a figure might appear. I did not know what I would have done if one did, any more than I knew what I was going to do when I got to Athens. If I wanted to live in England; what I wanted to do. I was in the same state as when I came down from Oxford. I only knew what I didn't want to do; and all I had gained, in the matter of choosing a career, was a violent determination never again to be a teacher of any sort. I'd empty dustbiris rather than that. An emotional desert lay in front of me, an inability ever to fall in love again that was compounded of the virtual death of Lily and the actual death of Alison. I was disintoxicated of Lily; but my disappointment at failing to match her had become in part a disappointment at my own character; an unwanted yet inevitable feeling that she would vitiate or haunt any relationship I might form with another woman; stand as a ghost behind every lack of taste, every stupidity. Only Alison could have exorcised her. I remembered those moments of relief at Monemvasia and on the ship coming back to Phraxos, moments when the most ordinary things seemed beautiful and lovable--possessors of a magnificent quotidaneity. I could have found that in Alison. Her special genius, or uniqueness, was her normality, her reality, her predictability; her crystal core of nonbetrayal; her attachment to all that Lily was not. I was marooned; wingless and leaden, as if I had been momentarily surrounded, then abandoned, by a flock of strange winged creatures; emancipated, mysterious, departing, as singing birds pass on overhead; leaving a silence spent with voices. Only too ordinary voices, screams, came faintly up from the bay. More horseplay. The present eroded the past. The sun slanted through the pines, and I walked one last time to the statue. Poseidon, perfect majesty because perfect control, perfect health, perfect adjustment, stood flexed to his divine sea; Greece the eternal, the never-fathomed, the bravest because the clearest, the mystery-atnoon land. Perhaps this statue was the centre of Bourani, its omphalos--not the house or the Earth or Conchis or Lily, but this still figure, benign, all-powerful, yet unable to intervene or speak; able simply to be and to constitute.
66
The first thing I did when I arrived at the Grande Bretagne in Athens was to telephone the airport. I was put through to the right desk. A man answered. He didn't seem to know the name. I spelt it. He said, "Please wait a minute." Then a girl's voice; the same Greek-American who had been on duty that evening. "Who is that speaking please?" "A friend of a friend." A moment's silence. I knew then. For hours I had nursed the feverish tiny hope. I stared down at the tired green carpet. "Didn't you know?" "Know what?" "She's dead." "Dead?" My voice must have sounded strangely unsurprised.