The Magus - John Fowles [63]
them, why he should so strangely realise them, and above all, why he should have chosen me to be his solitary audience of one, remained a total mystery. But I knew I had become involved in something too uniquely bizarre to miss, or to spoil, through lack of patience or humour. I picked up _Time_ and the pamphlet. Then, as I looked back at the dark, inscrutable carob tree, I did feel a faint touch of fear. But it was a fear of the inexplicable, the unknown; not of the supernatural. As I walked across the gravel to the colonnade, where I could see Conchis was already sitting, his back to me, I decided on a course of action--or rather, of reaction. He turned. "A good siesta?" "Yes thank you." "You have read the pamphlet?" "You're right. it _is_ more fascinating than any historical novel." He kept a face impeccably proof to my ironic undertone. "Thank you very much." I put the pamphlet on the table. Calmly, in my silence, he began to pour me tea. He had already had his own and he went away to play the harpsichord for twenty minutes. As I listened to him I thought. The incidents seemed designed to deceive all the senses. Last night's had covered smell and hearing; this afternoon's, and that glimpsed figure of yesterday, sight. Taste seemed irrelevant--but touch... how on earth could he expect me even to pretend to believe that what I might touch was "psychic"? And then what on earth--appropriately, on earth--had these tricks to do with "travelling to other worlds"? Only one thing was clear; his anxiety about how much I might have heard from Mitford and Leverrier was now explained. He had practised his strange illusionisms on them; and sworn them to secrecy. When he came out he took me off to water his vegetables. The water had to be drawn up out of one of a battery of long-necked cisterns behind the cottage, and when we had done that and fed the plants we sat on a seat by the Priapus arbour, with the unusual smell, in summer Greece, of verdant wet earth all around us. He did his deep-breathing exercises; evidently, like so much else in his life, ritual; then smiled at me and jumped back twenty-four hours. "Now tell me about this girl." It was a command, not a question, or rather a refusal to believe I could refuse again. "There's nothing really to tell." "She turned you down." "No. Or not at the beginning. I turned her down." "And now you wish...?" "It's all over. It's all too late." "You sound like Adonis. Have you been gored?" There was a silence. I took the step; something that had nagged me ever since I had discovered he was a doctor; and also to shock his old man's mocking of my young man's fatalism. "As a matter of fact I have." He looked sharply at me. "By syphilis. I managed to get it early this year in Athens." Still he observed me. "It's all right. I think I'm cured." "Who diagnosed it?" "The man in the village. Patarescu." "Tell me the symptoms." "The clinic in Athens confirmed his diagnosis." "No doubt." His voice was dry, so dry that my mind leapt to what he hinted at. "Now tell me the symptoms." In the end he got them out of me; in every detail. "As I thought. You had soft sore." "Soft sore?" "Chancroid. _Ulcus molle_. A very common disease in the Mediterranean. Unpleasant, but harmless. The best cure is frequent soap and water." "Then why the hell..." He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the ubiquitous Greek gesture for money, for money and corruption; I suddenly felt like Candide. "Have you paid?" "Yes. For this special penicillin." "You can do nothing." "I can damn well sue the clinic." "You have no proof that you did not have syphilis." "You mean Patarescu --" "I mean nothing. He acted with perfect medical correctness. A test is always advisable." It was almost as if he were on their side. He shrugged gently: what was, was. "He could have warned me." "Perhaps he thought it more important to warn you against venery than venality." I hit my thigh with my clenched fist. "Christ." We fell silent. In me battled a flood of relief at being reprieved and anger at such vile deception. At last Conchis spoke