The Magus - John Fowles [289]
mess, the cheap food, the queue to the counter. I guessed Kemp was having to queue also. And I became lost in the book. Then. In the outer seat opposite, diagonally from me. So quietly, so simply. She was looking down, then up, straight at me. I jerked round, searching for Kemp. But I knew where Kemp was; she was walking home. All the time I had expected some spectacular reentry, some mysterious call, a metaphorical, perhaps even literal, descent into a modem Tartarus. Not this. And yet, as I stared at her, unable to speak, at her steady bright look, the smallest smile, I understood that this was the only possible way of return; her rising into this most banal of scenes, this most banal of London, this reality as plain and dull as wheat. Since she was cast as Reality, she had come in her own; and so she came, yet in some way heightened, stranger, still with the aura of another world. From, yet not of, the crowd behind her. A dark brown tweed suit. A dark green scarf tied peasant-fashion round her head. She sat with her hands in her lap, waiting for me to speak, those clear eyes on mine. And it was impossible. Now it was here, I couldn't change. I couldn't look at her. I looked dcwn at the book, as if I wanted no more to do with her. Then angrily up past her at a moronically curious family, scene-sniffing faces at the table across the gangway. Then down at my book again. Suddenly she stood up and walked away. I watched her move between the tables. Her smallness, that slightly sullen smallness and slimness that was a natural part of her sexuality. I saw another man's eyes follow her out through the door. I let a few stunned, torn moments pass. Then I went after her, pushing roughly past the people in my way. She was walking slowly across the grass, towards the east. I came beside her. She gave the bottom of my legs the smallest glance. We said nothing. I looked round. So many people, so many too far to distinguish. And Regent's Park. Regent's Park. That other meeting; the scent of lilac, and bottomless darkness. "Where are they?" She gave a little shrug. "I'm alone." "Like hell." We walked more silent paces. She indicated with her head an empty bench beside a tree-lined path. She seemed as strange to me as if she had come from Tartarus; so cold, so calm. I followed her to the seat. She sat at one end and I sat halfway along, turned towards her, staring at her. Returned from the dead. Yet it infuriated me that she would not look at me, had made not the slightest sign of apology; and now would not say anything. I said, "I'm waiting. As I've been waiting these last three and a half months." She untied her scarf and shook her hair free. It had grown longer, and she had a warm tan. She looked as she had when we had first met. From my very first glimpse of her I realised, and it seemed to aggravate my irritation, that the image, idealised by memory, of a Lily always at her best had distorted Alison into what she was only at her worst. She was wearing a pale brown man's-collared shirt beneath the suit. A very good suit; Conchis must have given her money. She was pretty and desirable; even without... I remembered Parnassus. Her other selves. She stared down at the tip of her flat-heeled shoe. I said, "I want to make one thing clear from the start." She said nothing. "I forgive you that foul bloody trick you played this summer. I forgive you whatever miserable petty female vindictiveness made you decide to keep me waiting all this time." She shrugged. A silence. Then she said, "But?" "But I want to know what the hell went on that day in Athens. What the hell's been going on since. And what the hell's going on now." "And then?" Those grey eyes; her strangeness made them colder. "We'll see." She took a cigarette out of her handbag and lit it; and then without friendliness offered me the packet. I said, "No thanks." She stared into the distance, towards the aristocratic wall of houses that make up Cumberland Terrace and overlook the park. Cream stucco, a row of white statues along the cornices, the muted blues of the sky. A poodle ran