The Magus (76 page)

‘I’m in the bed. Nick, you could easy sleep on top.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Can you hear?’

‘Yes.’

Silence.

‘I thought you were asleep.’

Rain poured down, dripped in the gutters; wet London night air pervaded the room. Solitude. Winter.

‘Could I come in a wee sec and put the fire on?’

‘Oh God.’

‘I won’t wake you at all.’

‘Thanks.’

She slopped into the room and I heard her strike a match. The gas phutted and began to hiss. A pinkish glow filled the room. She was very quiet, but after a while I gave in and began to sit up.

‘Don’t look. I havna any clothes on.’

I looked. She was standing by the fire pulling down an outsize man’s singlet. I saw, with an unpleasant little shock, that she was almost pretty, or at least clearly female, by gaslight. I turned my back and reached for a cigarette.

‘Now look, Jojo, I’m just not going to have this. I will
not
have sex with you.’

‘I didna fancy to get into your clean bed with all m’ clothes on.’

‘Get warm. Then hop straight back.’

I got halfway through my cigarette.

‘It’s only ‘cause you been so awfla nice to me.’ I refused to answer. ‘I only want to be nice back.’

‘If it’s only that, don’t worry. You owe me nothing.’

I slid a look round. She was sitting on the floor with her plump little back to me, hugging her knees and staring into the fire. More silence.

She said, ‘It isn’t only that.’

‘Go and put your clothes on. Or get into bed. And then we’ll talk.’

The gas hissed away. I lit another cigarette from the end of the last.

‘I know why.’

‘Tell me.’

‘You think I took one of your nasty London diseases.’

‘Jojo.’

‘I mebbe have. You don’t have to be ill at all. You can still carry all the microbes round with you.’

‘Stop it.’

‘I’m only sayin’ what you’re thinkin’.’

‘I’ve
never
thought that.’

‘I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you at all.’

‘Jojo, shut up. Just shut up.’

Silence.

‘You just want to keep your beautiful Sassenach coddies clean.’

Then her bare feet padded across the floor and the bedroom door was slammed—and sprung open again. After a moment I heard her sobbing. I cursed my stupidity; I cursed myself for not having paid more attention to various signs during the evening—washed hair done into a ponytail, one or two looks. I had a dreadful vision of a stern knock on the door, of Alison standing there. I was also shocked. Jojo never swore and used as many euphemisms as a girl of fifty times her respectability. Her last line had cut.

I lay a minute, then went into the bedroom. The gasfnc cast warm light through. I pulled the bedclothes up round her shoulders.

‘Oh Jojo. You clown.’

I stroked her head, keeping a firm grip on the bedclothes with the other hand, in case she made a spring for me. She began to snuffle. I passed her a handkerchief.

‘Can I tell you somethin’?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ve never done it. I’ve never been to bed with a man.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I’m clean as the day I was born.’

‘Thank God for that.’

She turned on her back and stared up at me.

‘Do you not want me now?’

That sentence somewhat tarnished the two before. I touched her cheek and shook my head.

‘I love you, Nick.’

‘Jojo, you don’t. You can’t.’

She began to cry again; my exasperation.

‘Look, did you plan this? That flat tyre?’ I remembered she had slipped out, allegedly to go upstairs, while Kemp was making the cocoa.

‘I couldna help it. That night we went to Stonehenge. I didna sleep a wink all the wa’ back. Ijuist sat there pretendin’.’

‘Jojo. Can I tell you a long story I’ve never told anyone else? Can I?’

I dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief and then I began to talk, sitting with my back to her on the edge of the bed. I told her everything about Alison, about the way I had left her, and I spared myself nothing. I told her about Greece. I told her, if not the real incidents of my relationship with Lily, the emotional truth of it. I told her about Parnassus, all my guilt. I brought it right up to date, to Jojo herself and why I had cultivated her. She was the strangest priest to confess before; but not the worst. For she absolved me.

If only I had told her at the beginning; she would not have been so stupid then.

‘I’ve been blind. I’m sorry.’

‘I couldna help it.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

‘Och. I’m only a teenage moron from Glasgow.’ She looked at me solemnly. ‘I’m only seventeen, Nick. It was all a fib.’

‘If I gave you your fare, would you—’

But she was shaking her head at once.

There were minutes of silence then and in them. I thought about the only truth that mattered, the only morality that mattered, the only sin, the only crime. When Lily de Seitas had told me her version of it at the end of our meeting at the museum I had taken it as a retrospective thing, a comment on my past and on my anecdote about the butcher. But I saw now it had been about my future.

History has superseded the ten commandments of the Bible; for me they had never had any real meaning, that is, any other than a conformitant influence. But sitting in that bedroom, staring at the glow of the fire on the jamb of the door through to the sitting-room, I knew that at last I began to feel the force of this super-commandment, summary of them all; somewhere I knew I had to choose it, and every day afresh, even though I went on failing to keep it. Conchis had talked of points of fulcrum, moments when one met one’s future. I also knew it was all bound up with Alison, with choosing Alison, and having to go on choosing her every day. Adulthood was like a mountain, and I stood at the foot of this cliff of ice, this impossible and unclimbable:
Thou shalt not inflict unnecessary pain.

‘Could I have a fag, Nick?’

I went and got her a cigarette. She lay puffing it; intermittently red-apple cheeked, watching me. I held her hand.

‘What are you thinking, Jojo?’

‘Sposin’ she…’

‘Doesn’t come?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll marry you.’

‘That’s a fib.’

‘Give you lots of fat babies with fat cheeks and grins like monkeys.’

‘Och you cruel monster.’

She stared at me; silence; darkness; frustrated tenderness. I remembered having sat the same way with Alison, in the room off Baker Street, the October before. And the memory told me, in the simplest and most revealing way, how much I had changed.

‘Someone much nicer than I am will one day.’

‘Is she like me at all?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh aye. I’ll bet. Puir girl.’

‘Because you’re both … not like everybody else.’

‘There’s only one of everyone.’

I went out and put a shilling in the meter; then stood in the doorway between the two rooms. ‘You ought to live in the suburbs, Jojo. Or work in a factory. Or go to a public school. Or have dinner in an embassy.’

A train screamed to the north, from Euston way. She turned and stubbed the cigarette out.

‘I wish I was real pretty.’

She pulled the bedclothes up round her neck, as if to hide her ugliness.

‘Being pretty is just something that’s thrown in. Like the paper round the present. Not the present.’

A long silence. Pious lies. But what breaks the fall?

‘You’ll forget me.’

‘No, I won’t. I’ll remember you. Always.’

‘Not always. Mebbe a wee once in a while.’ She yawned. ‘I’ll remember you.’ Then she said, minutes later, as if the present was no longer quite real, a childhood dream, ‘In stinkin’ auld England.’

77

It was six o’clock before I got to sleep, and even then I woke up several times. At last, at eleven, I decided to face the day. I went to the bedroom door. Jojo had gone. I looked in the kitchen that was also a bathroom. There, scrawled on the mirror with a bit of soap were three X’s, a ‘Goodbye’, and her name. As casually as she had slipped into my life, she had slipped out of it. On the kitchen table lay my car pump.

The sewing-machines hummed dimly up from the floor below; women’s voices, the sound of stale music from a radio. I was the solitary man upstairs.

Waiting. Always waiting.

I leant against the old wooden draining-board drinking Nescafe and eating damp biscuits. As usual, I had forgotten to buy any bread. I stared at the side of an empty cereal packet. On it a nauseatingly happy ‘average’ family were shown round a breakfast table; breezy tanned father, attractive girlish mother, small boy, small girl; dreamland. Metaphorically I spat. Yet there must be some reality behind it all, some craving for order, harmony, beyond all the shabby cowardice of wanting to be like everyone else, the selfish need to have one’s laundry looked after, buttons sewn on, ruts served, name propagated, meals decently cooked.

I made another cup of coffee, and cursed Alison, the bloody bitch. “Why should I wait for her? Why of all places in London, a city with more eager girls per acre than any other in Europe, prettier girls, droves of restless girls who came to London to be stolen, stripped, to wake up one morning in a stranger’s bed …

Then Jojo, the last person in the world I had wanted to hurt. It was as if I had kicked a starving mongrel in its poor, thin ribs.

A violent reaction set on me, born of self-disgust and resentment. All my life I had been a sturdy contrasuggestible. Now I was soft; remoter from freedom than I had ever been. I thought with a leap of excitement of life without Alison, of setting out into the blue again … alone, but free. Even noble, since I was condemned to inflict pain, whatever I did. To America, perhaps; to South America.

Freedom was making some abrupt choice and acting on it; was as it had been at Oxford, allowing one’s instinct-cum-will to fling one off at a tangent, solitary into a new situation. I had to have hazard. I had to break out of this waiting-room I was in.

I walked through the uninspiring rooms. The Bow
chinoiserie
plate hung over the mantelpiece. The family again; order and involvement. Imprisonment. Outside, rain; a grey scudding sky. I stared down Charlotte Street and decided to leave Kemp’s, at once, that day. To prove to myself that I could move, I could cope, I was free.

I went down to see Kemp. She took my announcement coldly. I wondered if she knew about Jojo, because I could see a stony glint of contempt in her eyes as she shrugged off my excuse—that I had decided to rent a cottage in the country, I was going to write.

‘You taking Jojo, are you?’

‘No. We’re bringing it to an end.’

‘You’re
bringing it to an end.’

She knew about Jojo.

‘All right, I’m bringing it to an end.’

‘Tired of slumming. Thought you would be.’

‘Think again.’

‘You pick up a poor little scob like that, God only knows wiry, then when you’re sure she’s head over fucking heels in love with you, you act like a real gentleman. You kick her out.’

‘Look—’

‘Don’t kid
me,
laddie.’ She sat square and inexorable. ‘Go on. Run back home.’

‘I haven’t got a bloody home, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Oh yes you have. They call it the bourgeoisie.’

‘Spare me that.’

‘Seen it a thousand times. You discover we’re human beings. Makes you shit with fright.’ With an insufferable dismissiveness she added, ‘It’s not your fault. You’re a victim of the dialectical process.’

‘And you’re the most impossible old—’

‘Dab.!’ She turned away as if she didn’t care a damn, anyway; as if life was like her studio, full of failures, full of mess and disorder, and it took her all her energy to survive in it herself. A Mother Courage gone sour, she went to her paints table and started fiddling.

I went out. But I had hardly got to the top of the stairs to the ground floor when she came out and bawled up at me.

‘Let me tell you something, you smug bastard.’ I turned. ‘You know what will happen to that poor damn kid? She’ll go on the game. And you know who’ll have put her there?’ Her outstretched finger seared its accusation at me. ‘Mister Saint Nicholas Urfe. Esquire.’ That last word seemed the worst obscenity I had ever heard pass her lips. Her eyes scalded me, then she went back and slammed the studio door. So there I was, between the Scylla of Lily de Seitas and the Charybdis of Kemp; bound to be sucked down.

I packed in a cold rage; and lost in a fantasy row with Kemp, in which I scored all the points, I lifted the Bow plate carelessly off its nail. It slipped; struck the edge of the gasfire; and a moment later I was staring down at it in the hearth, broken in two across the middle.

I knelt. I was so near tears that I had to bite my lips savagely hard. I knelt there holding the two pieces. Not even trying to fit them together. Not even moving when I heard Kemp’s footsteps on the stairs. She came in and I was kneeling there. I don’t know what she had come up to say, but when she saw my face she did not say it.

I raised the two pieces a little to show her what had happened. My life, my past, my future. Not all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men.

She was silent for a long moment, taking it in, the half-packed case, the mess of books and papers on the table; the smug bastard, the broken butcher, on his knees by the hearth.

She said, ‘Jesus Christ. At your age.’

So I stayed with Kemp.

78

The smallest hope, a bare continuing to exist, is enough for the anti-hero’s future; leave him, says our age, leave him where mankind is in its history, at a crossroads, in a dilemma, with all to lose and only more of the same to win; let him survive, but give him no direction, no reward; because we too are waiting, in our solitary rooms where the telephone never rings, waiting for this girl, this truth, this crystal of humanity, this reality lost through imagination, to return; and to say she returns is a lie.

But the maze has no centre. An ending is no more than a point in sequence, a snip of the cutting shears. Benedick kissed Beatrice at last; but ten years later? And Elsinore, that following spring?

So ten more days. But what happened in the following years shall be silence; another mystery.

Ten more days, in which the telephone never rang.

Instead, on the last day of October, All Hallows Eve, Kemp took me for a Saturday afternoon walk. I should have suspected such an uncharacteristic procedure; but it happened that it was a magnificent day, with a sky from another world’s spring, as blue as a delphinium petal, the trees russet and amber and yellow, the air as still as in a dream.

Besides, Kemp had taken to mothering me. It was a process that needed so much compensatory bad language and general gruffness that our relationship was sergeant-majored into something outwardly the very reverse of its true self. Yet it would have been spoilt if we had declared it, if we had stopped pretending that it did not exist; and in a strange way this pretending seemed an integral part of the affection. Not declaring we liked each other showed a sort of mutual delicacy that proved we did. Perhaps it was Kemp who made me feel happier during those ten days; perhaps it was an aftermath of Jojo, least angelic of angels, but sent by hazard from a better world into mine; perhaps it was simply a feeling that I could wait longer than I had till then imagined. Whatever it was, something in me changed. I was still the butt, yet in another sense; Conchis’s truths, especially the truth he had embodied in Lily, matured in me. Slowly I was learning to smile, and in the special sense that Conchis intended. Though one can accept, and still not forgive; and one can decide, and still not enact the decision.

We walked north, across the Euston Road and along the Outer Circle into Regent’s Park. Kemp wore black slacks and a filthy old cardigan and an extinguished Woodbine, the last as a sort of warning to the fresh air that it got through to her lungs only on a very temporary sufferance. The park was full of green distances, of countless scattered groups of people, lovers, families, solitaries with dogs, the colours softened by the imperceptible mist of autumn, as simple and pleasing in its way as a Boudin beachscape.

We strolled, watched the ducks with affection, the hockey-players with contempt.

‘Nick boy,’ said Kemp, I need a cup of the bloody national beverage.’

And that too should have warned me; her
manes
all drank coffee.

So we went to the tea pavilion, stood in a queue, then found half a table. Kemp left me to go to the ladies’. I pulled out a paperback I had in my pocket. The couple on the other side of the table moved away. The noise, the mess, the cheap food, the queue to the counter. I guessed Kemp was having to queue also. And I became lost in the book.

In the outer seat opposite, diagonally from me.

So quietly, so simply.

She was looking down at the table, not at me. I jerked round, searching for Kemp. But I knew Kemp was walking home.

She said nothing. Waited.

All the time I had expected some spectacular re-entry, some mysterious call, a metaphorical, perhaps even literal, descent into a modern Tartarus. And yet, as I stared at her, unable to speak, at her refusal to return my look, I understood that this was the only possible way of return; her rising into this most banal of scenes, this most banal of London, this reality as plain and dull as wheat. Since she was cast as Reality, she had come in her own, yet in some way heightened, stranger, still with the aura of another world; from, but not of, the crowd behind her.

She was wearing a delicate-patterned tweed suit, autumn flecked with winter; a dark green scarf, tied peasant-fashion, round her head. She sat with her hands primly in her lap, as if she had done her duty: she was here. Every other move was mine. But now the moment had come I could do nothing, say nothing, think nothing. I had imagined too many ways of our meeting again, and yet none like this. In the end I even stared down at my book, as if I wanted no more to do with her—then angrily up past her at a moronically curious family, scene-sniffing faces across the gangway. She did at last give me a little, lancing look; of only a fraction of a moment, but it caught the face I had really meant for the ones opposite.

Without warning she stood and walked away. I watched her move between the tables: her smallness, that slightly sullen smallness and slimness that was a natural part of her sexuality. I saw another man’s eyes follow her through the door.

I let a few stunned, torn seconds pass. Then I gave chase, pushing roughly past the people in my “way. She was walking slowly across the grass, towards the east. I came beside her, and she gave the bottom of my legs the smallest token glance. Still we said nothing. I felt so caught unawares—it was even in our clothes. I had lost all interest in what I wore, how I looked … had taken on the cryptic colouring of Kemp’s and Jojo’s worlds. Now I felt uncouth beside her, and resented it; she had no right to reappear like some clothes-conscious and self-possessed young middle-class wife. It was almost as if she wanted to flaunt the reversal in our roles and fortunes. I looked round. There were so many people, so many too far to distinguish. And Regent’s Park. That other meeting, of the young deserter and his love; the scent of lilac, and bottomless darkness.

‘Where are they?’

She gave a little shrug. ‘I’m alone.’

‘Like hell.’

We walked more silent paces. She indicated with her head an empty bench beside a tree-lined path. She seemed as strange to me as if she had indeed come from Tartarus; so cold, so calm.

I followed her to the seat. She sat at one end and I sat halfway along, turned towards her, staring at her. It infuriated me that she would not look at me, had made not the slightest sign of apology; would not say anything.

I said, ‘I’m waiting. As I’ve been waiting these last three and a half months.’

She untied her scarf and shook her hair free. It had grown again, as when I first knew her, and she had a warm tan. From my very first glimpse of her I realized, and it seemed to aggravate my irritation, that the image, idealized by memory, of a Lily always at her best had distorted Alison into what she was only at her worst. She was wearing a pale-brown shirt beneath the suit. It was a very good suit; Conchis must have given her money. She was pretty and desirable; even without … I remembered Parnassus, her other selves. She stared down at the tip of her flat-heeled shoes.

I looked out over the grass. ‘I want to make one thing clear from the start.’ She said nothing. ‘I forgive you that foul bloody trick you played this summer. I forgive you whatever miserable petty female vindictiveness made you decide to keep me waiting all this time.’

She shrugged. A silence. Then she said, ‘But?’

‘But I want to know what the hell went on that day in Athens. What the hell’s been going on since. And what the hell’s going on now.’

‘And then?’

‘We’ll see.’

She took a cigarette out of her handbag and lit it; and then without friendliness offered me the packet. I said, ‘No thanks.’

She stared into the distance, towards the aristocratic wall of houses that make up Cumberland Terrace and overlook the park. Cream stucco, a row of white statues along the cornices, the muted blues of the sky.

A poodle ran up to us. I waved it away with my foot, but she patted it on the head. A woman called, ‘Tina! Darling! Come here.’ In the old days we would have exchanged grimaces of disgust. She went back to staring at the houses. I looked round. There were other seats a few yards away. Other sitters and watchers. Suddenly the peopled park seemed a stage, the whole landscape a landscape of masquers, spies. I lit one of my own cigarettes; willed her to look at me, but she wouldn’t.

‘Alison.’

She glanced at me briefly, but then down again. She sat, holding the cigarette. As if nothing would make her speak. A plane leaf lolloped down, touched her skirt. She bent and picked it up, smoothed its yellow teeth against the tweed. An Indian came and sat on the far end of the bench. A threadbare black overcoat, a white scarf; a thin face. He looked small and unhappy, timidly alien; a waiter perhaps, the slave of some cheap curry-house kitchen. I moved a little closer to her, lowered my voice, and forced it to sound as cold as hers.

‘What about Kemp?’

‘Nicko, please don’t interrogate me. Please don’t.’

My name; a tiny shift. But she was still set hard and silent.

‘Are they watching? Are they here somewhere?’

An impatient sigh.

‘Are they?’

‘No.’ But at once she qualified it. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Meaning you do.’

Still she wouldn’t look at me. She spoke in a small, almost a bored, voice.

‘It’s nothing to do with them now.’

There was a long pause.

I said, ‘You can’t lie to me. Face to face.’

She touched her hair; the hair, her wrist, a way she had of raising her face a little as she made the gesture. A glimpse of the lobe of an ear. I had a sense of outrage, as if I was being barred from my own property.

‘You’re the only person I’ve ever felt could never lie to me. Can you imagine what it was like in the summer? When I got that letter, those flowers

She said, ‘If we start talking about the past.’

All my overtures were in some way irrelevant; she had something else on her mind. My fingers touched a smooth dry roundness in my coat pocket: a chestnut, a talisman. Jojo had passed it to me wrapped in a toffee-paper, her pawky joke, one evening in a cinema. I thought of Jojo, somewhere only a mile or two away through the brick and the traffic, sitting with some new pick-up, drifting into her womanhood; of holding her pudgy hand in the darkness. And suddenly I had to fight not to take Alison’s.

I said her name again.

But coming to a decision, determined to be untouched, she threw the yellow leaf away. ‘I’ve returned to London to sell the flat. I’m going back to Australia.’

‘Long journey for such a small matter.’

‘And to see you.’

‘Like this?’

‘To see if I… ‘ but she cut her sentence short.

‘If you?’

‘I didn’t want to come.’

‘Then why are you here?’ She shrugged. ‘If it’s against your will?’

But she would not answer. She was mysterious, almost a new woman; one had to go back several steps, and start again;
and know the place for the first time.
As if what had once been free in her, as accessible as a pot of salt on the table, was now held in a phial, sacrosanct. But I knew Alison. I knew how she took on the colour and character of the people she loved or liked, however independent she remained underneath. And I knew where that smooth impermeability came from. I was sitting with a priestess from the temple of Demeter.

I tried to be matter-of-fact. ‘Where have you been since Athens? At home?’

‘Perhaps.’

I took a breath. ‘Have you thought about me at all?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Is there someone else?’

She hesitated, then said, ‘No.’

‘You don’t sound very certain.’

‘There’s always someone else—if you’re looking for it.’

‘Have you been looking for it?’

She said, ‘There’s no one.’

‘And I’m included in that “no one”?’

‘You’ve been included in it ever since that… day.’

The sullen profile, that perverse stare into the distance. She was aware of my look, and her eyes followed someone who was passing, as if she found him more interesting than me.

‘What am I meant to do ? Take you in my arms? Fall on my knees? What do they want?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh yes, you damn well do.’

Her eyes flicked sideways at me, and she looked down. She said, ‘I saw through you that day. That’s all. For ever.’

‘I made love to you that day. Also … in a sense … for ever.’

I watched her breathe in, as if on a pent-up scorn; waited for her to say something, anything, even the scorn; quelled my own growing anger with her, tried to sound calm.

‘There was a moment on that mountain when I loved you. I don’t think you know, I know you know. I saw it. I know you too well not to be sure you saw it too. And remember it.’ I added, ‘And I’m not talking about bodies.’

Again she waited to answer.

‘Why should I remember it? Why shouldn’t I do everything I can to forget it?’

‘You know the answer to that, too.’

‘Do I?’

I said, ‘Alison

‘Don’t come closer. Please don’t come closer.’

She would not look at me. But it was in her voice. I had a feeling of trembling too deep to show; as if the brain cells trembled. She spoke with her head turned away. ‘All right, I know what it means.’ Her face still averted, she took out another cigarette and lit it. ‘Or it meant. When I loved you. It meant everything you said or did to me had meaning. Emotional meaning. It moved me, excited me. It depressed me, it made me … ‘ she took a deep breath. ‘Like the way after all that’s happened you can sit there in that tea place and look at me as if I’m a prostitute or something and—’

‘It was a shock. For God’s sake.’

I touched her then, my hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off. I had to move closer, to hear what she said.

‘Whenever I’m with you it’s like going to someone and saying, “Torture me, abuse me. Give me hell. Because—”

‘Alison.’

‘Oh you’re nice now. You’re nice now. So bloody nice. For a week, for a month. And then we’d start again.’

She was not crying, I leant forward and looked. In some way I knew she was acting, and yet not acting. Perhaps she had rehearsed the saying this; but still meant it.