The Magus - John Fowles [26]
the Aegean, sent little waves curling like lazy whips along the shingle. Nothing appeared, everything waited. For the second time that day I felt like Robinson Crusoe. I put the book back beneath the towel, and faced the hill in a rather self-conscious way, convinced by now that I was indeed being watched. I bent down and picked up the towel and the book and put them on top of the rock with the fins, where they would be easier to find if someone came looking for them. Not out of kindness, but to justify my curiosity to the hidden eyes. The towel had a trace of feminine perfume on it; suntan oil. I went back to where my own clothes were and watched out of the corner of my eye along the beach. After a time I withdrew to the shade of the pine trees behind the beach. The white spot on the rock gleamed in the sun. I lay back and went to sleep. It can't have been for long. But when I woke up and looked down the beach, the things had gone. The girl, for I'd decided it was a girl, had done her retrieving unseen. I dressed and walked down to the place. The normal path back to the school was from the middle of the bay. At this end I could see another small path that led up away from the beach where the wire turned. It was steep, and the undergrowth inside the fence was too dense to see through. Small pink heads of wild gladioli flopped out of the shadows, and some warbler in the thickest of the bushes reeled out a resonant, stuttering song. It must have been singing only a few feet from me, with a sobbing intensity, like a nightingale, but much more brokenly. A warning or a luring bird? I couldn't decide, though it was difficult not to think of it as meaningful. It scolded, fluted, screeched, jugjugged, entranced. Suddenly, a clear bell sounded from some way beyond the undergrowth. The bird stopped singing, and I climbed on. The bell sounded again, three times. It was evidently calling people to some meal, English tea, or perhaps a child was playing with it. After a while the ground levelled out on the back of the headland, and the trees thinned a little, though the undergrowth kept on as thickly as ever. Then there was a gate, chained and painted. But the paint was peeling, the chain rusty, and a well-worn way had been forced through the wire by the right-hand gatepost. A wide, grassy track led along the headland, seawards and slightly downhill, but it curved between the trees and revealed nothing of the house. I listened for a minute, but there was no sound of voices. Down the hill the bird began to sing again. Then I saw it. I went through the gap. It was two or three trees in, rusty, barely legible, roughly nailed high up the trunk of a pine, in the sort of position one sees _Trespassers will be prosecuted_ notices in England. But this notice said, in dull red letters on a white background, SALLE D'ATTENTE. It looked as if years ago it had been taken from some French railway station; some ancient student joke. Enamel had come off and cancerous patches of rusty metal showed through. At one end were what looked like several old bullet holes. It was Mitford's warning: Beware of the waiting room. I stood on the grassy track, in two minds whether to go on to the house, caught between curiosity and fear of being snubbed. I guessed immediately that this was the villa of the collaborationist he had quarrelled with; but I had pictured a shifty, rat-faced Greek Laval rather than someone cultured enough to read, or have guests who could read, Eliot and Auden in the original. I stood so long that I became impatient with my indecision, and forced myself to turn away. I went back through the gap and followed the track up towards the central ridge. It soon petered out into a goatpath, but one that had been recently used, because there were overturned stones that showed earth-red among the sun-bleached greys. When I reached the central ridge, I looked back. From that particular point the house was invisible, but I knew where it lay. The sea and the mountains floated in the steady evening sunshine. It was all peace, elements and void, golden air