The Magus by John Fowles Read Free Book Online Page A

a faint smile. The whisky was beginning to work. ‘It’s like those Hogarth pictures. Love a la mode. Five weeks later.’
    ‘Are we friends again?’
    ‘We can’t ever be friends again.’
    ‘If it hadn’t been you, I’d have walked out this evening.’
    ‘If it hadn’t been you I wouldn’t have come back.’
    She held out her glass for more whisky. I kissed her wrist, and went to fetch the bottle.
    ‘You know what I thought today?’ She said it across the room.
    ‘No.’
    ‘If I killed myself, you’d be pleased. You’d be able to go round saying, she killed herself because of me. I think that would always keep me from suicide. Not letting some lousy shit like you get the credit.’
    ‘That’s not fair.’
    ‘Then I thought I could do it if I wrote a note first explaining why I did it.’ She eyed me, still unmollified. ‘Look in my handbag. The shorthand pad.’ I got it out. ‘Look at the back.’
    There were two pages scrawled in her big handwriting.
    ‘When did you write this?’
    ‘Read it.’
    I don’t want to live any more. I spend most of my life not wanting to live. The only place I am happy is here where we’re being taught, and I have to think of something else, or reading books, or in the cinema. Or in bed. I’m only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist. I can’t remember having been happy for two or three years. Since the abortion. All I can remember is forcing myself sometimes to look happy so if I catch sight of my face in the mirror I might kid myself for a moment I really am happy.
    There were two more sentences heavily crossed out. I looked up into her grey eyes.
    ‘You can’t mean this.’
    ‘I wrote it today in coffee-time. If I’d known how to quietly kill myself in the canteen I’d have done it.’
    ‘It’s … well, hysterical.’
    ‘I am hysterical.’ It was almost a shout.
    ‘And histrionic. You wrote it for me to see.’
    There was a long pause. She kept her eyes shut.
    ‘Not just for you to see.’
    And then she cried again, but this time in my arms. I tried to reason with her. I made promises: I would postpone the journey to Greece, I would turn down the job – a hundred things that I didn’t mean and she knew I didn’t mean, but finally took as a placebo.
    In the morning I persuaded her to ring up and say that she wasn’t well, and we spent the day out in the country.
    The next morning, my last but two, came a postcard with a Northumberland postmark. It was from Mitford, the man who had been on Phraxos, to say that he would be in London for a few days, if I wanted to meet him.
    I rang him up on the Wednesday at the Army and Navy Club and asked him out for a drink. He was two or three years older than myself, tanned, with blue staring eyes in a narrow head. He had a dark young—officer moustache which he kept on touching, and he wore a dark-blue blazer, with a regimental tie. He reeked mufti; and almost at once we started a guerilla war of prestige and anti-prestige. He had been parachuted into Greece during the German occupation, and he was very glib with his Xans and his Paddys and the Christian names of all the other well-known condottieri of the time. He had tried hard to acquire the triune personality of the philhellene in fashion -gentleman, scholar, thug – but he spoke with a second-hand accent and the clipped, sparse prep-schoolisms of a Viscount Montgomery. He was dogmatic, unbrooking, lost off the battlefield. I managed to keep my end up, over pink gins: I told him my war had consisted of two years’ ardent longing for demobilization. It was absurd. I wanted information from him, not antipathy; so in the end I confessed I was a regular army officer’s son, and asked him what the island looked like.
    He nodded at the food-stand on the bar in the pub where we’d met. ‘There’s the island.’ He pointed with his cigarette. ‘That’s what the locals call it.’ He said some word in Greek. ‘The