The Magus - John Fowles [248]
looked in his book again for me, but there was nothing. Did he know who had brought the flowers? No, many people brought flowers. The breeze raised the wispy hairs over his wrinkled forehead. He was an old, tired man. The sky was very blue. A plane droned down to the airport on the other side of the Attic plain. Other visitors came, and the old man limped away. The dinner that evening was dreadful, the epitome of English vacuity. Before I went, I had some idea that I might tell them a little about Bourani; I saw a spellbound dinner table. But the idea did not survive the first five minutes of conversation. There were eight of us, five from the Council, an Embassy secretary, and a little middle-aged queer, a critic, who had come to do some lectures. There was a good deal of literary chitchat. The queer waited like a small vulture for names to be produced. "Has anyone read Murdoch's latest?" asked the Embassy man. "Couldn't stand it." "Oh I rather enjoyed it." The queer touched his bowtie. "Of course you know what Iris said when she..." I looked round the other faces, after he had done this for the tenth time, hoping to see a flicker of fellow feeling, someone else who wanted to shout at him that writing was about books, not the trivia of private lives. But they were all the same, each mind set in the same weird armour, like an archosaur's ruff, like a fringe of icicles. All I heard the whole evening was the tinkle of broken ice needles as people tried timidly and vainly to reach through the stale fence of words, tinkle, tinkle, and then withdrew. Nobody said what they really wanted, what they really thought. Nobody behaved with breadth, with warmth, with naturalness; and finally it became pathetic. I could see that my host and his wife had a genuine love of Greece, but it lay choked in their throats. The critic made a perceptive little disquisition on Leavis, and then ruined it by a cheap squirt of malice. We were all the same; I said hardly anything, but that made me no more innocent--or less conditioned. The solemn figures of the Old Country, the Queen, the Public School, Oxbridge, the Right Accent, People Like Us, stood around the table like secret police, ready to crush down in an instant on any attempt at an intelligent European humanity. It was symptomatic that the ubiquitous person of speech was "one"--it was one's view, one's friends, one's servants, one's favourite writer, one's travelling in Greece, until the terrible faceless Avenging God of the British, One, was standing like a soot-blackened obelisk over the whole evening. I walked back to the hotel with the critic, thinking, in a kind of agonised panic, of the light-filled solitudes of Phraxos; of the losses I had suffered. "Dreadful bores, these Council people," he said. "But one has to live." He didn't come in. He said he would stroll up to the Acropolis. But he strolled towards Zappeion, a park where the more desperate of the starving village boys who flock to Athens sell their thin bodies for the price of a meal. I went to Zonar's in Panepistemiou and sat at the bar and had a large brandy. I felt upset, profoundly unable to face the return to England. I was in exile, and forever, whether I lived there or not. The fact of exile I could stand; but the loneliness of exile was intolerable. It was about half-past twelve when I got back to my room. There was the usual hot airlessness of nocturnal Athens in summer. I had just stripped off my clothes and turned on the shower when the telephone rang by the bed. I went naked to it. I had a grim idea that it would be the critic, unsuccessful at Zappeion and now looking for a target for his endless Christian names. "Hello." "Meester Ouf." It was the night porter. "There is telephone for you." There was a clicketing. "Hello?" "Oh. Is that Mr. Urfe?" It was a man's voice I didn't recognise. Greek, but with a good accent. "Speaking. Who are you?" "Would you look out of your window, please?" Click. Silence. I rattled the hook down, with no result. The man had hung up. I snatched my dressing gown off the bed, switched out