The Magus Read online

  ‘What of?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maggie. The boys. The dear old diggers.’

  ‘This rough-house?’

  ‘Oh God. It was so stupid. There was a nice Israeli boy, we were just kissing. It was a party. That was all. But Charlie told Pete, and they just picked a quarrel, and … oh God. You know. He-men.’

  Downstairs I lost her for a time. A group formed round her. I went and got a drink and passed it over someone’s shoulder; talk about Cannes, about Collioure and Valencia. Jazz had started in the back room and I went to the doorway to watch. Outside the window, past the dark dancers, were dusk trees, a pale amber sky. I had a sharp sense of alienation from everyone around me. A girl with spectacles, myopic eyes in an insipidly soft face, one of those soulful-intellectual creatures born to be preyed on and exploited by phonies, smiled coyly from the other side of the room. She was standing alone and I guessed that she was the ‘nice English girl’ Margaret had picked for me. Her lipstick was too red; and she was as familiar as a species of bird. I turned away from her as from a cliff edge, and went and sat on the floor by a bookshelf. There I pretended to read a paperback.

  Alison knelt beside me. ‘I’m sloshed. That whisky. Hey, have some of this.’ It was gin. She sat sideways, I shook my head. I thought of that white-faced English girl with the red smudged mouth. At least this girl was alive; crude, but alive.

  ‘I’m glad you returned tonight.’

  She sipped her gin and gave me a small sizing look.

  I tried again. ‘Ever read this?’

  ‘Let’s cut corners. To hell with literature. You’re clever and I’m beautiful. Now let’s talk about who we really are.’

  The grey eyes teased; or dared.

  ‘Pete?’

  ‘He’s a pilot.’ She mentioned a famous airline. ‘We shack together. Off and on. That’s all.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He’s doing a conversion course. In the States.’ She stared at the floor, for a moment a different girl, more serious. ‘Engaged is Maggie talk. We’re not like that.’ She half flicked a glance at me. ‘Free people.’

  It wasn’t clear whether she was talking about her fiancé or for my benefit; or whether freedom was her pose or her truth.

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Things. Reception mostly.’

  ‘Hotels?’

  ‘Anything.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I’ve applied for a new job. Air hostess. That’s why I went off polishing French and Spanish these last weeks.’

  ‘Can I take you out tomorrow?’

  A heavy Australian in his thirties came and leant against a door-jamb opposite. ‘Oh Charlie,’ she cried across the room, ‘he’s just lent me his bath. It’s nothing.’

  Charlie nodded his head slowly, then pointed an admonitory stubby finger. He pushed himself vertical and went unsteadily away.

  ‘Charming.’

  She turned over her hand and looked at the palm.

  ‘Did you spend two and a half years in a Jap prisoner-of-war camp?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Charlie did.’

  ‘Poor Charlie.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Australians are boors, and Englishmen are prigs.’

  ‘If you –’

  ‘I make fun of him because he’s in love with me and he likes it. But no one else makes fun of him. If I’m around.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘About tomorrow.’

  ‘No. About you.’

  Gradually, though I was offended at having been taught a lesson in the art of not condescending, she made me talk about myself. She did it by asking blunt questions, and by brushing aside empty answers. I began to talk about being a brigadier’s son, about loneliness, and for once mostly not to glamourize myself but simply to explain. I discovered two things about Alison: that behind her blunt-ness she was an expert coaxer, a handler of men, a sexual diplomat, and that her attraction lay as much in her candour as in her having a pretty body, an interesting face, and knowing it. She had a very un-English ability to flash out some truth, some seriousness, some quick surge of interest. I fell silent. I knew she was watching me. After a moment I looked at her. She had a shy, thoughtful expression; a new self.

  ‘Alison, I like you.’

  ‘I think I like you. You’ve got quite a nice mouth. For a prig.’

  ‘You’re the first Australian girl I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Poor Pom.’

  All the lights except one dim one had long ago been put out, and there were the usual surrendered couples on all available furniture and floor-space. The party had paired off. Maggie seemed to have disappeared, and Charlie lay fast asleep on the bedroom floor. We danced. We began close, and became closer. I kissed her hair, and then her neck, and she pressed my hand, and moved a little closer still.

  ‘Shall we go upstairs?’

  ‘You go first. I’ll come in a minute.’ She slipped away, and I went up to my flat. Ten minutes passed, and then she was in the doorway, a faintly apprehensive smile on her face. She stood there in her white dress, small, innocent-corrupt, coarse-fine, an expert novice.

  She came in, I shut the door, and we were kissing at once, for a minute, two minutes, pressed back against the door in the darkness. There were steps outside, and a sharp double rap. Alison put her hand over my mouth. Another double rap; and then another. Hesitation, heart-beats. The footsteps went away.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Come on, come on.’

  4

  It was late the next morning when I woke. She was still asleep, with her naked brown back turned away from mc. I went and made some coffee and took it into the bedroom. She was awake then, staring at me over the top of the bedclothes. It was a long expressionless look that rejected my smile and ended abruptly in her turning and pulling the bedclothes over her head. I sat beside her and tried rather amateurishly to discover what was wrong, but she kept the sheet pulled tight over her head; so I gave up patting and making noises and went back to my coffee. After a while she sat up and asked for a cigarette. And then if I would lend her a shirt. She wouldn’t look me in the eyes. She pulled on the shirt, went to the bathroom, and brushed me aside with a shake of her hair when she came and got back into bed again. I sat at the foot of the bed and watched her drink her coffee.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Do you know how many men I’ve slept with the last two months?’

  ‘Fifty?’

  She didn’t smile.

  ‘If I’d slept with fifty I’d just be an honest professional.’

  ‘Have some more coffee.’

  ‘Half an hour after I first saw you last night I thought, if I was really vicious I’d get into bed with him.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘I could tell about you from the way you talked.’

  ‘Tell what?’

  ‘You’re the affaire de peau type.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  A silence.

  ‘I was sloshed,’ she said. ‘So tired.’ She gave me a long look, then shook her head and shut her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. You’re nice. You’re terribly nice in bed. Only now what?’

  ‘I’m not used to this.’

  lam.

  ‘It’s not a crime. You’re just proving you can’t marry this chap.’

  ‘I’m twenty-three. How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-five.’

  ‘Don’t you begin to feel things about yourself you know are you? Are going to be you forever? That’s what I feel. I’m going to be a stupid Australian slut forever.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘I tell you what Pete’s doing right now. You know, he writes and tells me. “I took a piece out last Friday and we had a wuzzamaroo.”’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘It means “and you sleep with anyone you like, too”.’ She stared out of the window. ‘We lived together, all this sp
ring. You know, we get on, we’re like brother and sister when we’re out of bed.’ She gave me a slanting look through the cigarette smoke. ‘You don’t know what it’s like waking up with a man you didn’t even know this time yesterday. It’s losing something. Not just what all girls lose.’

  ‘Or gaining something.’

  ‘God, what can we gain. Tell me.’

  ‘Experience. Pleasure.’

  ‘Did I tell you I love your mouth?’

  ‘Several times.’

  She stubbed the cigarette out and sat back.

  ‘Do you know why I tried to cry just now? Because I’m going to marry him. As soon as he comes back, I’m going to marry him. He’s all I deserve.’ She sat leaning back against the wall, with the too-large shirt on, a small female boy with a hurt face, staring at me, staring at the bedcover, in our silence.

  ‘It’s just a phase. You’re unhappy.’

  ‘I’m unhappy when I stop and think. When I wake up and see what I am.’

  ‘Thousands of girls do it.’

  ‘I’m not thousands of girls. I’m me.’ She slipped the shirt over her head, then retreated under the bedclothes. ‘What’s your real name? Your surname?’

  ‘Urfe. U, R, F, E.’

  ‘Mine’s Kelly. Was your dad really a brigadier?’

  ‘Yes. Just.’

  She gave a timid mock salute, then reached out a brown arm. I moved beside her.

  ‘Don’t you think I’m a tramp?’

  Perhaps then, as I was looking at her, so close, I had my choice. I could have said what I was thinking: Yes, you are a tramp, and even worse, you exploit your tramp-hood, and I wish I’d taken your sister-in-law-to-be’s advice. Perhaps if I had been farther away from her, on the other side of the room, in any situation where I could have avoided her eyes, I could have been decisively brutal. But those grey, searching, always candid eyes, by their begging me not to lie, made me lie.

  ‘I like you. Really very much.’

  ‘Come back to bed and hold me. Nothing else. Just hold me.’ I got into bed and held her. Then for the first time in my life I made love to a woman in tears.

  She was in tears more than once, that first Saturday. She went down to see Maggie about five and came back with red eyes. Maggie had told her to get out. Half an hour later Ann, the other girl in the flat, one of those unfortunate females whose faces fall absolutely flat from nostrils to chin, came up. Maggie had gone out and wanted Alison to remove all her things. So we went down and brought them up. I had a talk with Ann. In her quiet, rather prim way she showed more sympathy for Alison than I was expecting; Maggie was evidently and aggressively blind to her brother’s faults.

  For days, afraid of Maggie, who for some reason stood in her mind as a hated but still potent monolith of solid Australian virtue on the blasted moor of English decadence, Alison did not go out except at night. I went and bought food, and we talked and slept and made love and danced and cooked meals at all hours, sous les toits, as remote from ordinary time as we were from the dull London world outside the windows.

  Alison was always feminine; she never, like so many English girls, betrayed her gender. She wasn’t beautiful, she very often wasn’t even pretty. But she had a fashionably thin boyish figure, she had a contemporary dress sense, she had a conscious way of walking, and her sum was extraordinarily more than her parts. I would sit in the car and watch her walking down the street towards me, pause, cross the road; and she looked wonderful. But then when she was close, beside me, there so often seemed to be something rather shallow, something spoilt-child, in her appearance. Even close to her, I was always being wrong-footed. She would be ugly one moment, and then some movement, expression, angle of her face, made ugliness impossible.

  When she went out she used to wear a lot of eye-shadow, which married with the sulky way she sometimes held her mouth to give her a characteristic bruised look; a look that subtly made one want to bruise her more. Men were always aware of her, in the street, in restaurants, in pubs; and she knew it. I used to watch them sliding their eyes at her as she passed. She was one of those rare, even among already pretty, women that are born with a natural aura of sexuality: always in their lives it will be the relationships with men, it will be how men react, that matters. And even the tamest sense it.

  There was a simpler Alison, when the mascara was off. She had not been typical of herself, those first twelve hours; but still always a little unpredictable, ambiguous. One never knew when the more sophisticated, bruised-hard persona would reappear. She would give herself violently; then yawn at the wrongest moment. She would spend all one day clearing up the flat, cooking, ironing, then pass the next three or four bohemianly on the floor in front of the fire, reading Lear, women’s magazines, a detective story, Hemingway – not all at the same time, but bits of all in the same afternoon. She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them.

  One day she came back with an expensive fountain pen.

  ‘For monsieur.’

  ‘But you shouldn’t.’

  ‘It’s okay. I stole it.’

  ‘Stole it!’

  ‘I steal everything. Didn’t you realize?’

  ‘Everything!’

  ‘I never steal from small shops. Only the big stores. They ask for it. Don’t look so shocked.’

  ‘I’m not.’ But I was. I stood holding the pen gingerly. She grinned.

  ‘It’s just a hobby.’

  ‘Six months in Holloway wouldn’t be so funny.’

  She had poured herself a whisky. ‘Santé. I hate big stores. And not just capitalists. Pommy capitalists. Two birds with one steal. Oh, come on, sport, smile.’ She put the pen in my pocket. ‘There. Now you’re a cassowary after the crime.’

  ‘I need a Scotch.’

  Holding the bottle, I remembered she had ‘bought’ that as well. I looked at her. She nodded.

  She stood beside me as I poured. ‘Nicholas, you know why you take things too seriously? Because you take yourself too seriously.’

  She gave me an odd little smile, half tender, half mocking, and went away to peel potatoes. And I knew that in some obscure way I had offended her; and myself.

  One night I heard her say a name in her sleep.

  ‘Who’s Michel?’ I asked the next morning.

  ‘Someone I want to forget.’

  But she talked about everything else; about her English-born mother, genteel but dominating; about her father, a station-master who had died of cancer four years before.

  ‘That’s why I’ve got this crazy between voice. It’s Mum and Dad living out their battles again every time I open my mouth. I suppose it’s why I hate Australia and I love Australia and I couldn’t ever be happy there and yet I’m always feeling homesick. Does that make sense?’

  She was always asking me if she made sense.

  ‘I went to see the old family in Wales. Mum’s brother. Jesus. Enough to make the wallabies weep.’

  But she found me very English, very fascinating. Partly it was because I was ‘cultured’, a word she often used. Pete had always ‘honked’ at her if she went to galleries or concerts. She mimicked him: ‘What’s wrong with the boozer, girl?’

  One day she said, ‘You don’t know how nice Pete is. Besides being a bastard. I always know what he wants, I always know what he thinks, and what he means when he says anything. And you, I don’t know anything. I offend you and I don’t know why. I please you and I don’t know why. It’s because you’re English. You couldn’t ever understand that.’

  She had finished high school in Australia, and had even had a year doing languages at Sydney University. But then she had met Pete, and it ‘got complicated’. She’d had an abortion and come to England.

  ‘Did he make you have the abortion?’

  She was sitting on my knees.

  ‘He never knew.’

  ‘Never knew!’

  ‘It could have been someone else’s. I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘You poor kid.�
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  ‘I knew if it was Pete’s he wouldn’t want it. And if it wasn’t his he wouldn’t have it. So.’

  ‘Weren’t you – ‘

  ‘I didn’t want a baby. It would have got in the way.’ But she added more gently, ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘And still?’

  A silence, a small shrug.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  I couldn’t see her face. We sat in silence, close and warm, both aware that we were close and aware that we were embarrassed by the implications of this talk about children. In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.

  One evening we went to see Game’s old film Quai des Brumes. She was crying when we came out and she began to cry again when we were in bed. She sensed my disapproval.

  ‘You’re not me. You can’t feel like I feel.’

  ‘I can feel.’

  ‘No, you can’t. You just choose not to feel or something, and everything’s fine.’

  ‘It’s not fine. It’s just not so bad.’

  ‘That film made me feel what I feel about everything. There isn’t any meaning. You try and try to be happy and then something chance happens and it’s all gone. It’s because we don’t believe in a life after death.’

  ‘Not don’t. Can’t.’

  ‘Every time you go out and I’m not with you I think you may die. I think about dying every day. Every time I have you, I think this is one in the eye for death. You know, you’ve got a lot of money and the shops are going to shut in an hour. It’s sick, but you’ve got to spend. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Of course. The bomb.’

  She lay smoking.

  ‘It’s not the bomb. It’s us.’

  She didn’t fall for the solitary heart; she had a nose for emotional blackmail. She thought it must be nice to be totally alone in the world, to have no family ties. When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends – using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world – she just laughed. ‘You like it,’ she said. ‘You say you’re isolated, boyo, but you really think you’re different.’ She broke my hurt silence by saying, too late, ‘You are different.’