The Magus - John Fowles [32]
appearance was foreign. He had a bizarre family resemblance to Picasso; saurian as well as simian, decades of living in the sun, the quintessential Mediterranean man, who had discarded everything that lay between him and his vitality. A monkey-glander, essence of queen bees; and intense by choice and exercise as much as by nature. He was plainly not a dandy about clothes; but there are other sorts of narcissism. "I didn't realise you were English." "I spent the first nineteen years of my life in England. Now I have Greek nationality and my mother's name. My mother was Greek." "You go back to England?" "Never." He jumped swiftly on. "Do you like my house? I designed and built it myself." I looked around. "I envy you." "And I envy you." "Not much to envy." "You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you." His face was without the offensively avuncular smile that usually accompanies such trite statements; and something intent about the look he gave me made it clear he did not think it trite; that it did not carry its usual meaning. He stood up. "Well. Now I will leave you for a few minutes. Then we shall have a look round." I stood up with him, but he gestured me down again. "Finish the cakes. Maria will be honoured. Please." He walked into the sunlight at the edge of the colonnade, stretched his arms and fingers, and with another gesture to me to help myself passed back inside the room. From where I was sitting I could see one end of a cretonne-covered sofa, a table with a bowl of milky flowers on it. The wall behind was covered by bookshelves, from the ceiling to the floor. I stole another _kourabi� The sun was beginning to float down on the mountains, and the sea glittered lazily at the foot of their ashy, opaque shadows. Then there was an unannounced shock of antique sound, a rapid arpeggio, far too real to come from a radio or record. I stood up, wondering what new surprise I was being presented with. There was a moment's silence, perhaps to leave me guessing. Then came the quiet plangent sound of a harpsichord. I hesitated, then decided that two could play the independence game, and sat down again. He played quickly, and then tranquilly; once or twice he stopped and retook a phrase. The old woman came and silently cleared away, without once looking at me, even when I pointed at the few cakes left and praised them in my stilted Greek; the hermit master evidently liked silent servants. The music came clearly out of the room, and flowed around me and out through the colonnade into the light. He broke off, repeated a passage, and then stopped as abruptly as he had begun. A door closed, there was a silence. Five minutes passed, then ten. The sun crept towards me over the red tiles. I felt I ought to have gone in earlier; that now I had put him in a huff. But he appeared in the doorway, speaking. "I have not driven you away." "Not at all. It was Bach?" "Telemann." "You play very well." "Once, I _could_ play. Never mind. Come." His jerkiness was pathological; as if he wanted to get rid not only of me, but of time itself. I stood up. "I hope I shall hear you play again." He made a little bow, refusing the invitation to invite. "I hope you will." "One gets so starved of music here." "Only of music?" He went on before I could answer. "Come now. Prospero will show you his domaine." As we went down the steps to the gravel I said, "Prospero had a daughter." "Prospero had many things." He turned a look on me. "And not all young and beautiful, Mr. Urfe." "You live alone here?" "What some would call alone. What others would not." He stared ahead as he said it; whether to mystify me once more or because there was no more to be said to a stranger, I couldn't tell. He walked rapidly on, alertly, incessantly pointing things out. He showed me around his little vegetable-garden terrace: his cucumbers, his almonds, his loquats, his pistachios. From the far edge of the terrace I could see down to where I had been lying only an hour or two before. "Moutsa." "I haven't heard it called that before." "Albanian." He