The Magus - John Fowles [39]
is dead. As dead as alchemy." He cut out with his hands, with the callipers, dismissing that as well. "I realised that one day before the war. Do you know what I did? I burnt every novel I possessed. Dickens. Cervantes. Dostoievsky. Flaubert. All the great and all the small. I even burnt something I wrote myself when I was too young to know better. I burnt them out there. It took me all day. The sky took their smoke, the earth their ashes. It was a fumigation. I have been happier and healthier ever since." I remembered my own small destroying and thought, grand gestures are splendid--if you can afford them. He picked up a book and slapped the dust off it. "Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?" "For fun?" "Fun!" He pounced on the word. "Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction." "I see." "For this." A life of Franklin Roosevelt. "This." A French paperback on astrophysics. "This. Look at this." It was an old pamphlet--_An Alarme for Sinners, Containing the Last Words of the Murderer Robert Foulkes, 1679_. "There, take that and read it over the weekend. See if it is not more real than all the historical novels you have ever read." His bedroom extended almost the seaward width of the house, like the music room below. At one end was a bed--a double bed, I noticed--and a huge wardrobe; at the other, a closed door led through into what must have been a very small room, a dressing room perhaps. Near that door stood a strange-looking table, the top of which he lifted. It was (I had to be told) a clavichord. The centre of the room was fitted out as a kind of sitting room and study. There was another tiled stove, and a desk littered with the papers he must have been working on, and two armchairs upholstered in pale brown to match a chaise longue. In one corner there was a triangular cabinet full of pale blue and green Isnik ware. Flooded with evening light, it was altogether a more homely room than the one downstairs, and by contrast pleasantly free of books. But its tone was really set by its two paintings: both nudes, girls in sunlit interiors, pinks, reds, greens, honeys, ambers; all light, warmth, glowing like yellow fires with life, humanity, domesticity, sexuality, Mediterraneity. "You know him?" I shook my head. "Bonnard. He painted them both five or six years before he died." I stood in front of them. He said, behind me, "These, I paid for." "They were worth it." "Sunlight. A naked girl. A chair. A towel, a bidet. A tiled floor. A little dog. And he gives the whole of existence a reason." I stared at the one on the left, not the one he had inventoried. It showed a girl by a sunlit window with her back turned, apparently drying her loins and watching herself in the mirror at the same time. I was remembering Alison, Alison wandering about the flat naked, singing, like a child. It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again. Conchis moved out on the terrace, and I followed him. By the westward of the two French doors stood a small Moorish ivory-inlaid table. It carried a bowl of flowers set, as if votively, before a photograph. It was a large picture in an old-fashioned silver frame, with the photographer's name stamped floridly in gold across the bottom corner--a London address. A girl in an Edwardian dress stood by a vase of roses on an improbable Corinthian pedestal, while painted foliage drooped sentimentally across the background. It was one of those old photographs whose dark chocolate shadows are balanced by the creamy richness of the light surfaces; of a period when women had bosoms, not breasts. The young girl in the picture had a massed pile of light hair, and a sharp waist, and that plump softness of skin and slightly heavy Gibson-girl handsomeness of feature that the age so much admired. Conchis had stopped and saw me give it a lingering glance. "She was once my fianc�" I looked again. "You never married her?"