The Magus

by John Fowles

I felt I was teaching her, anglicizing her accent, polishing off her roughnesses, her provincialisms;

Yuck.

I began quietly to rape the island.

he sat chubbily at his desk,

all games, even the most literal, between a man and a woman are implicitly sexual;

‘And I don’t call wanting to know better someone I find quite extraordinarily attractive bullying.’

Ugh, he is just the worst.

Perhaps it was partly a nostalgia for that extinct Lawrentian woman of the past, the woman inferior to man in everything but that one great power of female dark mystery and beauty; the brilliant, virile male and the dark, swooning female.

‘Alison, I’m sick of women, sick of love, sick of sex, sick of everything. I don’t know what I want. I should never have asked you to come.’ She looked down, seeming tacitly to agree. ‘The fact is… well, I suppose I have a sort of nostalgia for a sister at the moment.

I thought I could see in her walk a touch of that old amoral sexuality, that quality she could not help offering and other men noticing.

I felt, beyond the insult to my virility before an attractive girl, ill-at-ease and guilty.

But her voice had that peculiar feminine tone that invites you to go on as much as to stop.

I almost wished she was there, beside me, for companionship. To talk to, nothing more, like a man friend.

‘Tonight I intend to tell you something that is for our sex alone. Womankind has no place in it.’

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

Before she could move I gave her a slap across the cheeks. It was controlled, not hard, just enough to sting, but it shocked her.

‘Psychiatry is getting more and more interested in the other side of the coin—why sane people are sane, why they won’t accept delusions and fantasies as real.

I still couldn’t accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka.

She was about fifty, with greying hair cut boyishly short; no lipstick, a hard, intelligent, quasi-lesbian face

It was not that I preyed on girls; but the fact that my only access to normal humanity, to social decency, to any openness of heart, lay through girls, preyed on me. It was in that that I was the real victim.

She had too small a mouth; I detected the ghostly beginnings of the mask of the bitch-goddess Ambition.

I watched her move between the tables: her smallness, that slightly sullen smallness and slimness that was a natural part of her sexuality.

I forgive you whatever miserable petty female vindictiveness made you decide to keep me waiting all this time.’