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

16

The bed was a cheap iron one. Besides a second table, a carpet, and an armchair, there was only an old, locked cassone, of a kind to be found in every cottage on the island. It was the least likely millionaire’s spare room imaginable. The walls were bare except for a photograph of a number of village men standing in front of a house—the house. I could make out a younger Conchis in the center, wearing a straw hat and shorts, and there was one woman, a peasant woman, though not Maria, because she was Maria’s age in the photo and it was plainly twenty or thirty years old. I held up the lamp and turned the picture round to see if there was anything written on the back. But the only thing there was a fragile gecko, which clung splayfooted to the wall and watched me with cloudy eyes. Geckos like seldom-used rooms.

On the table by the head of the bed there was a flat shell to serve as an ashtray, and three books; a collection of ghost stories, an old Bible and a large thin volume entitled The Beauties of Nature. The ghost stories purported to be true, “authenticated by at least two reliable witnesses.” The list of contents—Borley Rectory, The Isle of Man Polecat, No. 18 Dennington Road, The Man with the Limp—reminded me of being ill at boarding school. I opened The Beauties of Nature. The nature was all female, and the beauty all pectoral. There were long shots of breasts, shots of breasts of every material from every angle, and against all sorts of background, closer and closer, until the final picture was of nothing but breast, with one dark and much larger than natural nipple staring from the center of the glossy page. It was much too obsessive to be erotic.

I picked up the lamp and went into the bathroom. It was well fitted out, with a formidable medicine chest. I looked for some sign of a woman’s occupation, and found none. There was running water, but it was cold and salt; for men only.

I went back to my room and lay on the bed. The sky in the open window was a pale night blue and one or two first faint northerly stars blinked over the trees. Outside, the crickets chirped monotonously, with a Webern-like inconsistency yet precision of rhythm. I heard small noises from the cottage below my window, and I could smell cooking. In the house was a great stillness.

I was increasingly baffled by Conchis. At times he was so Germanically dogmatic that I wanted to laugh, to behave in the traditionally xenophobic, continentals-despising way of my race; at times, rather against my will, he impressed me, and not only as a rich man with some enviable works of art in his house. And now he quite definitely frightened me. It was the kind of illogical fear of the supernatural that in others made me sneer; but all along I had felt that I was invited not out of hospitality, but for some other reason. He wanted to use me in some way. I now discounted homosexuality; he had had his chances and ignored them. Beside, the Bonnards, the fiancée, the book of breasts, all discounted it.

Something much more bizarre was afoot. Are you elect… Even here I am not alone… I am psychic… it all pointed to spiritualism, to table tapping. Perhaps the lady of the glove was a medium of some kind. Certainly Conchis hadn’t got the petty-bourgeois gentility and the woolly vocabulary I associated with séance holders; but he was equally certainly not a normal man.

I lit a cigarette, and after a while I smiled. In that small bare room, it seemed not to matter, even if I was a shade scared. The truth was that I was full of a sort of green stir. Conchis was no more than the chance agent, the event that had come at the right time; just as in the old days, I might, after a celibate term at Oxford, have met a girl and begun an affaire with her; I had begun something exciting with him. It seemed linked in a way with my wanting to see Alison again. I wanted to live again.

The house was as quiet as death, as the inside of a skull; but the year was 1953, I was an atheist and an absolute nonbeliever in spiritualism, ghosts and all that mumbo-jumbo. I lay there waiting for the half-hour to pass; and the silence of the house was still, that day, much more a silence of peace than one of fear.