The Magus - John Fowles [267]
some by Seferis. "Maurice Conchis, the famous poet." I looked sourly up. "Brilliant choice on my part." She took the books and put them on the table. "I thought you did it very intelligently." "Even though I'm a very foolish young man." "Silliness and intelligence are not incompatible. Especially in your sex and at your age." She went and sat in her wingchair again, and smiled again at my unsmiling face; an insidiously warm, friendly smile from an intelligent, balanced woman. But how could she be balanced? I went to the window. Sunlight touched my hands. I could see Benjie and the Norwegian girl playing catch down by the loggia. Every so often their cries reached back to us. "Supposing I'd believed your story about Mr. Rat?" "I should have remembered something very interesting about him." "And?" "You would have come out again to hear it." "Supposing I'd never traced you in the first place?" "A Mrs. Hughes would in due course have asked you to lunch." "Just like that?" "Of course not. She would have written a letter." She sat back, closed her eyes. "My dear Mr. Urfe, I must explain that I have obtained your name from the British Council. My husband, who was the first English master at the Lord Byron School, died recently and among his private papers we have come across an account, hitherto unknown to me, of a remarkable experience that..." she opened her eyes and raised her eyebrows interrogatively. "And when would this call have come? How much longer?" "I'm afraid I can't tell you that." "Won't tell me." "No. It is not for me to decide." "Look, there's just one person who has to do the deciding. If she --" "Precisely." She reached up to the mantelpiece beside her and took a photo out from behind an ornament there; handed it to me. "It's not very good. Benjie took it with his Brownie." It was of three women on horseback. One was Lily de Seitas. The second was Gunnel. The third, in the middle, was Alison. She looked insecure, and was laughing down into the camera. "Has she met... your daughters?" Her blue-grey eyes stared up at me. "Please keep that. I had it made for you." I flung my will against hers. "Where is she?" "You may search the house." She watched me, chin on hand, in the yellow chair; unnettled; in possession. Of what, I didn't know; but in possession. I felt like a green young dog in pursuit of a cunning old hare; every time I leapt, I bit brown air. I looked at the photo of Alison, then tore it in four and threw it into an ashtray on a console table by the window. Silence, which eventually she broke. "My poor resentful young man, let me tell you something. Love may really be more a capacity for love in oneself than anything very lovable in the other person. I believe Alison has a very rare capacity for attachment and devotion. Far more than I have ever had. I think it is very precious. And all I have done is to persuade her that she must not underestimate, as I believe she has all her life till now, what she has to give." "How kind." She sighed. "Sarcasm again." "Well what do you expect? Tears of remorse?" "Sarcasm is so ugly. And so revealing." There was silence. After a time, she went on. "You are really the luckiest and the blindest young man. Lucky because you are born with some charm for women, even though you seem determined not to show it to me. Blind because you have had a little piece of pure womankind in your hands. Do you not realise that Alison possesses the one great quality our sex has to contribute to life? Beside which things like education, class, background, are nothing? And you've let it slip." "Helped by your charming daughters." "My daughters were nothing but a personification of your own selfishness." A dull, deep rage brewing in me. "I happened--stupidly, I grant you--to fall in love with one of them." "As an unscrupulous collector falls in love with a painting he wants. And will do anything to get." "Except that this wasn't a painting. It was a girl with as much morality as a worn-out whore from the Place Pigalle." She let a little silence pass, the elegant drawing-room reprove, then said