"The Magus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fowles John)

14

Long before I came up to the gate out of Bourani, I saw something whitish lying in the gap. At first I thought it was a handkerchief, but when I stooped to pick it up I saw it was a cream-colored glove; and of all gloves, an elbow-length woman’s glove. Inside the wrist was a yellowish label, with the words Mireille, gantiêre embroidered on it in blue silk. The label, like the glove, seemed unreasonably old, something from the bottom of a long-stored trunk. I smelt it, and there it was, that same scent as on the towel the week before—musky, old-fashioned like sandalwood. When Conchis had said that he’d been down on Moutsa the week before, it had been this one fact, the sweet womanish perfume, that had puzzled me.

Now I began to understand why he might not want unexpected visits, or gossip. Why he should want to risk his secret with me, perhaps, next week, let me know it, I couldn’t imagine; what the lady was doing out in Ascot gloves, I couldn’t imagine; and who she was, I couldn’t imagine. She might be a mistress, but she might equally well be a daughter, a wife, a sister—perhaps someone weakminded, perhaps someone elderly. It flashed through my mind that it was someone who was allowed out in the grounds of Bourani and down at Moutsa only on pain of keeping herself concealed. She would have seen me the week before; and this time, have heard my arrival and tried to catch a glimpse of me—that explained the old man’s quick looks past me, and perhaps some of his nervous strangeness. He knew she was “out"; it explained the second place at the tea table, and the mysterious bell.

I turned around, half expecting to hear a giggle, a rather inane giggle; and then as I looked at the thick shadowy scrub near the gate, and remembered the grim reference to Prospero, a more sinister explanation came to me. Not weakmindedness, but some terrible disfigurement. Not all young and beautiful, Mr. Urfe. I felt, for the first time on the island, a small cold shiver of solitary-place fear.

The sun was getting low and night comes with near tropical speed in Greece. I didn’t want to have to negotiate the steep northside paths in darkness. So I hung the glove neatly over the center of the top bar of the gate and went on quickly. Half an hour later the charming hypothesis occurred to me that Conchis was a transvestite. After a while I began, for the first time in months, to sing.

I told no one, not even Méli, about my visit to Conchis, but I spent many hours conjecturing about the mysterious third person in the house. I decided that a weakminded wife was the most likely answer; it would explain the seclusion, the taciturn servants.

I tried to make up my mind about Conchis too. I was far from sure that he was not just a homosexual; that would explain Mitford’s inadequate warning, though not very flatteringly to me. The old man’s nervous intensity, that jerking from one place to another, one subject to another, his jaunty walk, the gnomic answers and mystifications, the weird ffinging-up of his arms when I left—all his mannerisms suggested, were calculated to suggest, that he wanted to seem younger and more vital than he was.

There remained the peculiar business of the poetry book, which he must have had ready to puzzle me. I had been swimming a long time that first Sunday, far out in the bay, and he could easily have slipped the things onto the Bourani end of the beach while I was in the water. But it seemed an oddly devious means of introduction. Then what did my “being elect” mean—our “having much to discover"? In itself it could mean nothing; in regard to him it could mean only that he was mad. And Some would say I lived alone: I remembered the scarcely concealed contempt with which he had said that.

I found a large-scale map of the island in the school library. The boundaries of the Bourani estate were marked. I saw it was bigger, especially to the east, than I had realized: six or seven hectares, some fifteen acres. Again and again I thought of it, perched on its lonely promontory, during the weary hours of plodding through Eckersley’s purgatorial English Course. I enjoyed conversation classes, I enjoyed doing more advanced work with what was known as the Philologic Sixth, a small group of eighteen-year-old duds who were doing languages only because they were hopeless at science, but the endless business of “drilling” the beginners bored me into stone. What am I doing? I am raising my arm. What is he doing? He is raising his arm. What are they doing? They are raising their arms. Have they raised their arms? They have raised their arms.

It was like being a champion at tennis, and condemned to play with rabbits, as well as having always to get their wretched balls out of the net for them. I would look out of the window at the blue sky and the cypresses and the sea, and pray for the day’s end, when I could retire to the masters’ wing, lie back on my bed and sip an ouzo. Bourani seemed greenly remote from all that; so far, and yet so near; its small mysteries, which grew smaller as the week passed, no more than an added tang in its other promise of civilized pleasure.