The Magus Read Online Free PDF

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 spring. 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,