The Magus Read Online Free PDF Page B

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