The Magus - John Fowles [256]
to face Lily, to question her, to try to understand the ununderstandable; not because I longed for her. I could have longed for certain aspects of her, for certain phases--but it was that very phasality that made her impossible to love. So I could almost think of her, the light-phase her, as one thinks tenderly but historically of the moments of poetry in one's life, and yet still hate her for what she had done. But I had to do something while I waited, while I absorbed the experience osmotically into my life. So throughout the latter half of August I pursued the trail of Conchis and Lily in England; and through them, of Alison. It kept me, however tenuously and vicariously, in the masque; and it dulled my agonising longing to see Alison. Agonising because a new feeling had seeded and was growing inside me, a feeling I wanted to eradicate and couldn't, not least because I knew the seed of it had been planted by Conchis and was germinating in this deliberate silence and absence he had surrounded me with; a feeling that haunted me as the embryo grows in the reluctant mother's womb, sweeping her day and night, that I despised, disproved, dismissed, and still it grew, with rage, then in green moments melting her with... but I couldn't say the word. And for a time it lay buried under enquiries, conjectures, letters. _The newspaper cuttings_. Different type from that of the _Holborn Gazette_, where the inquest report would have appeared; and did not appear. _Foulkes pamphlet_. Is in the British Museum Catalogue. Conchis's are not. _Theatre costumier's_. I tried Berman's and one or two others, without the least success. _Earthquakes_. There were earthquakes in 1884 and 1892 in the Ionian Islands. In a tragic way that part of Conchis's story was confirmed just before I began my research. On August 9, 1953, 450 people died in the Ionian disaster. _Military history_. Letter from Major Arthur Lee-Jones. _DEAR MR. URFE,_ _I'm afraid your letter does ask, as you say yourself, for the impossible. The units engaged in the Neuve Cha pelle set piece were mostly regular ones. I think it most unlikely that any Princess Louise's Kensington Regiment volunteers would have seen that engagement, even under the circumstances you suggest. But of course we have poor detailed records of that chaotic time, and I can't hazard more than an opinion._ _I can find no trace in the records of a captain called Montague. Usually one is on safer ground with officers. But perhaps he was seconded from one of the county regiments._ _De Deukans_. No family of this name in the Almanach de Gotha or any other likely source I looked at. _The fire at Givray-le-Duc on August 17, 1922_. Unreported in The Times and the _Telegraph_. Perhaps not surprisingly, as I found Givray-le-Duc was absent from even the largest French gazetteers. The spider _Theridion deukansii_: doesn't exist, though there is a genus _Theridion_. _Seidevarre_. Letter from Johan Fredriksen. _DEAR SIR,_ _The mayor of Kirkenes has passed to me, who is the schoolmaster, your letter to answer. There is in Pasvikdal a place of the name Seidevarre and there was in that place many years from now a family of the name Nygaard. I am very sorry we do not know what is become with this family._ _I am very pleased to help you._ _Lily's mother_. I drove down to Cerne Abbas, not expecting to find either an Ansty Cottage or a Silver Street. I did not. I told the manageress at the little hotel where I had lunch that I'd once known two girls from Genie Abbas--twins, very pretty, but I'd forgotten their surname. It left her deeply worried--she knew everyone in the village and couldn't think who it could have been. The "headmaster" at the primary school: in reality a headmistress. Obviously the letters bad been intercepted on Phraxos; and a reply sent to England for posting. _Charles-Victor Bruneau_. Not in Grove. A man I spoke to at the Royal Academy of Music had never heard of him; or, needless to say, of Gonchis. _Conchis's costume at the "trial_." On my way back from Cerne Abbas I stopped for dinner in Hungerford, and