The Magus - John Fowles [67]
her sanction. "One evening I could stand it no longer. I slipped out of my hiding place and went to St. John's Wood. It was an evening when I knew Lily went after dinner to a weekly patriotic sewing and knitting circle. In a nearby parish hall. I waited in the road I knew she must take. It was a warm May dusk. I was fortunate. She came alone. Suddenly I stepped out into her path from the gateway where I had been waiting. She went white with shock. She knew something terrible had happened, by my face. As soon as I saw her my love for her overwhelmed me--and what I had planned to say. I cannot remember now what I said. I can remember only walking beside her in the dusk towards Regent's Park, because we both wanted darkness and to be alone. She would not argue, she would not say anything, she would not look at me for a long time. We found ourselves by that gloomy canal that runs through the north part of the park. On a seat. She began to ask me questions, almost practical questions, about what I was intending to do. Then she began to cry. I was not allowed to comfort her. I had deceived her. That was the unforgivable. Not that I had deserted. But that I had deceived. For a time she stared away from me, down the black canal. Then she put her hand on mine and stopped me talking. Finally she put her arms round me, and still without words. And I felt myself all that was bad in Europe in the arms of all that was good. "But there was so much misunderstanding between us. It was not that even then I believed myself to have been wrong to run away. But it is possible, even normal, to feel right in front of history and very wrong in front of those one loves. And as for Lily, after a while she began to talk, and I realised that she understood nothing of what I had said about the war. That she saw herself not as I so much wanted, as my angel of forgiveness, but as my angel of salvation. She begged me to go back. She thought I would be spiritually dead until I did. Again and again she used the word 'resurrected.' And again and again, on my side, I wanted to know what would happen to us. And finally she said, this was her judgment, that the price of her love was that I should return to the front--not for her, but for myself. To find my true self again. And that the reality of her love was as it had been in the wood: she should never marry anyone else, whatever happened. "In the end we were silent. You will have understood. Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity. We were at the opposite poles of humanity. Lily was humanity bound to duty, unable to choose, suffering, at the mercy of social ideals. Humanity both crucified and marching towards the cross. And I was free, I was Peter three times to renounce--determined to survive, whatever the cost. I still see her face. Her face staring, staring into the darkness as if she was trying to gaze herself into another world. It was as if we were locked in a torture chamber. Still in love, yet chained to opposite walls, facing each other for eternity and for eternity unable to touch. "Of course, as men always will, I tried to extract some hope from her. That she would wait for me, not judge me too quickly... such things. But she stopped me with a look. A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgin Mary's. It reversed the entire order of nature. "I walked back beside her, in silence. I said goodbye to her under a streetlamp. By a garden full of lilac trees. We did not touch. Not a single word. Two young faces, suddenly old, facing each other. The moment that endures when all the other noises, objects, all that dull street, have sunk into dust and oblivion. Two white faces. The scent of lilac. And bottomless darkness." He paused. There was no emotion in his voice; but I was thinking of Alison, of that last look she had given me. "And that is all. Four days later I spent a very disagreeable twelve hours crouched in the bilges of a Greek cargo boat in Liverpool docks." There was a silence. "And did you ever see her