The Magus

I said, “I’m waiting. As I’ve been waiting these last three and a half months.”

She untied her scarf and shook her hair free. It had grown longer, and she had a warm tan. She looked as she had when we had first met. From my very first glimpse of her I realized, and it seemed to aggravate my irritation, that the image, idealized by memory, of a Lily always at her best had distorted Alison into what she was only at her worst. She was wearing a pale brown man’s-collared shirt beneath the suit. A very good suit; Conchis must have given her money. She was pretty and desirable; even without… I remembered Parnassus. Her other selves. She stared down at the tip of her flat-heeled shoe.

I said, “I want to make one thing clear from the start.” She said nothing. “I forgive you that foul bloody trick you played this summer. I forgive you whatever miserable petty female vindictiveness made you decide to keep me waiting all this time.”

She shrugged. A silence. Then she said, “But?”

“But I want to know what the hell went on that day in Athens. What the hell’s been going on since. And what the hell’s going on now.”

“And then?”

Those gray eyes; her strangeness made them colder.

“We’ll see.”

She took a cigarette out of her handbag and lit it; and then without friendliness offered me the packet. I said, “No thanks.”

She stared into the distance, towards the aristocratic wall of houses that make up Cumberland Terrace and overlook the park. Cream stucco, a row of white statues along the cornices, the muted blues of the sky.

A poodle ran up to us. I waved it away with my foot, but she patted it on the head. A woman called, “Tina! Darling! Come here.” In the old days we would have exchanged grimaces of disgust. She went back to staring at the houses. I looked round. There were other seats a few yards away. Other sitters and watchers. Suddenly the whole peopled park seemed a stage, the whole landscape a landscape of masquers, spies. I lit one of my own cigarettes; willed her to look at me, but she wouldn’t. She was still punishing me; not now with absence, but with silence.

I had imagined this scene so often; and it was always in essence a melting, a ru

“Alison.”

She looked at me briefly, but then down again. She sat, holding the cigarette. As if nothing would make her speak. A plane leaf lolloped down, touched her skirt. She bent and picked it up, smoothed its yellow teeth against the tweed. An Indian came and sat on the far end of the bench. A threadbare black overcoat, a white scarf; a thin face. He looked small and unhappy, timidly alien; a waiter perhaps, the slave of some cheap curryhouse kitchen. I moved a little closer to her, lowered my voice, and forced it to sound as cold as hers.

“What about Kemp?”

“We went to see her.”

“We?”

“Yes. We.”

“Have you seen them? All of them?”

“Nicko, please don’t interrogate me. Please don’t.”

My name; a tiny shift. But she was still set hard and silent.

“Are they watching? Are they here somewhere?”

An impatient sigh.

“Are they?”

“No.” But at once she qualified it. “I don’t know.”

I said, “Look at me. Look at me.”

And she couldn’t do it. Face to face she could not lie to me. She looked away and said, “It was the one last thing. One last time. It’s nothing.”

There was a long pause.

I said, “You can’t lie to me. Face to face.”

She touched her hair; the hair, her wrist, a way she had of raising her face a little as she made the gesture. A glimpse of the lobe of an ear. I had a sense of outrage, as if I was being barred from my own property.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever felt that about. That they could never lie to me. So can you imagine what it was like in the summer? When I got that letter, those flowers…

She said, “If we start talking about the past.”

All my overtures were in some way irrelevant; she had something else on her mind. My fingers touched a smooth dry roundness in my coatpocket: a chestnut, a talisman. Jojo had passed it to me wrapped in a toffeepaper, her pawky joke, one evening in a cinema. I thought of Jojo, somewhere only a mile or two away through the brick and the traffic, sitting with some new pick-up, drifting into her womanhood; of holding her pudgy hand in the darkness. And suddenly I had to fight not to take Alison’s.

I said, “Allie?”

But coming to a decision, determined to be untouched, she threw the yellow leaf away. “I’ve returned to London to sell the flat.” She looked briefly at me; she wasn’t lying. “I’m going back to Australia.”

Terrible; we were like total strangers.

“Long journey for such a small matter.”

“And to see you.”

“Like this?”

“To see if I…” but she cut her sentence short, as if by some previous resolution. Or advice?

“If you?”

“I didn’t want to come. They made me.”

“Made you?” I sounded unbelieving.

“Made me feel I ought to come.”

“Just to see me.”

“Yes.”

“So you’re here against your will.”

“You could call it that.”

“And now you’ve seen me.”

But she would not answer the implicit question. She threw me one quick look, a sudden flash of fierceness. But then went back to her silence. She was mysterious, almost a new woman; one had to go back several steps, and start again; and know the place for the first time. As if what had once been free in her, as accessible as a pot of salt on a table, was now held in a phial, sacrosanct. But I knew Alison, I knew how she took on the color and character of the people she loved or liked, however independent she remained underneath. And I knew where that smooth impermeability came from. I was sitting with a priestess from the temple of Demeter.

I tried to be matter-of-fact. “Where have you been since Athens? At home?”

“Perhaps.”

I took a breath. “Have you thought about me at all?”

“Sometimes.”

They had told her: Be like white marble, be oblique. But why?

“Is there someone else?”

She hesitated, then said, “No.”

“You don’t sound very certain.”

“There’s always someone else—if you’re looking for it.”

“Have you been… looking for it?”

She said, “There’s no one.”

“And I’m included in that 'no one'?”

“You’ve been included in it ever since that… day.”

What Lily de Seitas had said: she is not a present being given to you; you must convince her you have the money to pay for her. I looked at Alison’s sullen profile, that perverse stare into the distance. She was aware of my look, and her eyes followed someone who was passing, as if she found him more interesting than me.

I said, “What is it?”

“What’s what?”

“What am I meant to do? Take you in my arms? Fall on my knees? What do they want?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh yes you damn well do.”

Her eyes flicked sideways at me, and she looked down. She said, “I saw through you that day. That’s all. For ever.”

There was a long pause.

I said quietly, “I made love to you that day. Also… in a sense… for ever.”

She shrugged, but a moment later she half turned her back and averted her face, her arm on the back of the seat. I spoke to the ground.

“There was a moment on that mountain when I loved you. I don’t think you know, I know you know, I know you saw it, I know you too well not to be sure you saw it. And remember it.” She said nothing. “You’re meant to answer.”

“Why should I remember it? Why shouldn’t I do everything I can to forget it?”

“You know the answer to that, too.”

“Do I?” So cold, so small, so quiet.

I said, “Alison…”

“Don’t come closer. Please don’t come closer.”

She would not look at me. But it was in her voice. I had a feeling of trembling too deep to show; as if the brain cells trembled. She spoke with her head turned away. “All right, I know what it means.” Her face still averted, she took out another cigarette and lit it. “Or it meant. When I loved you. It meant everything you said or did to me had meaning. Emotional meaning. It moved me, excited me. It depressed me, it made me…” she took a deep breath. “Like the way after all that’s happened you can sit there in that tea place and look at me as if I’m a prostitute or something and—”