The Magus - John Fowles [281]
76
And so I waited. It seemed sadistic, this last wasteland of days. It was as if Conchis, with Alison's connivance, proceeded by some outmoded Victorian dietetic morality--one couldn't have more jam, the sweetness of events, until one ate a lot more bread, the dry stodge of time. But I was long past philosophising. The next weeks consisted of a long struggle between my growing--not diminishing--impatience and the manner of life I took up to dull it. Almost every night I contrived to pass through Russell Square, rather in the way, I suppose, that the sailors' wives and black-eyed Susans would, more out of boredom than hope, haunt the quays in sailing days. But my ship never showed a light. Two or three times I went out to Much Hadham, at night, but the darkness of Dinsford House was as complete as the darkness in Russell Square. For the rest, I spent hours in cinemas, hours reading books, mainly rubbish, because all I required of a book during that period was that it kept my mind drugged. I used to drive all through the night to places I did not want to go to--to Oxford, to Brighton, to Bath. These long drives calmed me, as if I was doing something constructive by racing hard through the night; scorching through sleeping towns, always turning back in the small hours and driving exhausted into London in the dawn; then sleeping till four or five in the afternoon. It was not only my boredom that needed calming; well before my meetings with Lily de Seitas I had had another problem. I spent many of my waking hours in Soho or Chelsea; and they are not the areas where the chaste fianc�oes--unless he is burning to test his chastity. There were dragons enough in the forest, from the farded old bags in the doorways of Creek Street to the equally pickupable but more appetising "models" and demidebs of the King's Road. Every so often I would see a girl who would excite me sexually. I began by repressing the very idea; then frankly admitted it. If I resolutely backed out of, or looked away from, promising situations, it was for a variety of reasons; and reasons generally more selfish than noble. I wanted to show _them_--if they had eyes present to be shown, and I could never be sure that they hadn't--that I could live without affaires; and less consciously I wanted to show myself the same thing. I also wanted to be able to face Alison with the knowledge that I had been faithful to her, though I partly wanted this knowledge as a weapon, an added lash to the cat--if the cat had to be used. The truth was that the recurrent new feeling I had for Alison had nothing to do with sex. Perhaps it had something to