The Magus - John Fowles [69]
mysterious, remote-sounding harmonies. The recorder came in with an adagiolike slowness and gravity, momentarily wobbled off-key, then recovered. I tiptoed to the open door of the music room, but there something held me back--an odd childlike feeling, of misbehaving after bedtime. The door was wide open, but it opened towards the harpsichord, and the edge of one of the bookshelves blocked the view through the crack. The music came to an end. A chair shifted, my heart raced, Conchis spoke a single indistinguishable word in a low voice. I flattened myself against the wall. There was a rustle. Someone was standing at the door of the music room. It was a slim girl of about my own height, in her early twenties. In one hand she held a recorder, in the other a small crimson fluebrush for it. She was wearing a wide-collared, blue-and-white-striped dress that left her arms bare. There was a bracelet above one elbow, and the skirt came down narrow-bottomed almost to her ankles. She had a ravishingly pretty face, but completely untanned, without any makeup, and her hair, her outline, the upright way she held herself, everything about her was of forty years before. I knew I was supposed to be looking at Lily. It was unmistakably the same girl as in the photographs; especially that on the cabinet of cuiiosa. The Botticelli face; grey-violet eyes. The eyes especially were beautiful; very large, their ovals faintly twisted, a cool doe's eyes, almond eyes, giving a natural mystery to a face otherwise so regular that it risked perfection. Perfectly beautiful faces are always boring. She saw me at once. I stood rooted to the stone floor. For a moment she seemed as surprised as I was. Then she looked swiftly, secretly with her large eyes back to where Conchis must have been sitting at the harpsichord, and then again at me. She raised the fluebrush to her lips, shook it, forbidding me to move, to say anything, and she smiled. It was like some genre picture--The Secret. The Admonition. But her smile was strange--as if she was sharing a secret with me, that this was an illusion that we must both keep up. There was something about her mouth, calm and amused, that was at the same time enigmatic and debunking; pretending and admitting the pretence. She flashed another look back at Conchis, then leant forward and lightly pushed my arm with the tip of the brush, as if to say, Go away. The whole business can't have taken more than five seconds. The door was closed, and I was standing in darkness and an eddy of sandalwood. I think if it _had_ been a ghost, if the girl had been transparent and headless, I might have been less astonished. She had so clearly implied that of course it was all a charade, but that Conchs must not know it was; that she was in fancy dress for him, not for me. I went swiftly down the hall to the front door, and eased its bolts open. Then I padded out onto the colonnade. I looked through one of the narrow arched windows and immediately saw Conchs. He had begun to play again. I moved to look for the girl. I was sure that no one could have had time to cross the gravel. But she was not there. I moved round behind his back, until I had seen every part of the room. And she was not there. I thought she might be under the front part of the colonnade, and peered cautiously round the corner. It was empty. The music went on. I stood, undecided. She must have run through the opposite end of the colonnade and round the back of the house. Ducking under the windows and stealing past the open doors, I stared out across the vegetable terrace, then walked around it. I felt sure she must have escaped this way. But there was no sign of anybody. I waited out there for several minutes, and then Conchis stopped playing. Soon the lamp went out and he disappeared. I went back and sat in the darkness on one of the chairs under the colonnade. There was a deep silence. Only the crickets cheeped, like drops of water striking the bottom of a gigantic well. Conjectures flew through my head. The people I had seen, the sounds I had heard, and that vile smell,