The Magus - John Fowles

by John Fowles

"Stop it."

  "I'm only sayin' what you're thinldn'."

  "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 juist 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 stem 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 gasfire 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 snuff. 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 fiat tire?" 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. I juist sat there pretendin'." Tears in her eyes again.

  "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 heself 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 it I thought about pain, about hurting people. It was the only truth that mattered, it was the only morality that mattered, the only sin, the only crime. Once again I had committed the one unforgivable: I had hurt an innocent person. It needed clearer definition than that, because no one was innocent. But there was a capacity in everyone to be innocent, to offer that something innocent in them, perhaps to offer it as clumsily as Jojo had, even not to offer it innocently, but with darker motives. But there remained a core of innocence, a purely innocent will to give something good; and this was the unforgivable crime — to have provoked that giving and then to smash, as I had just had to smash, the gift to pieces.

  History had in a sense smashed 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 threshold of the door through to the sitting room, I thought that at last I began to see a commandment. The missing link; though no link was ever missing, but simply unseen. And after all, not unseen by Lily de Seitas. I had had it whispered in my ear only a few weeks before; I had had it demonstrated to me in a way at my "trial"; for that matter I had even paid lipservice to it long before I went to Greece. But now I felt it; and by "feel" I mean that I knew I had to choose it, every day, even though I went on failing to keep it, had every day to choose it, every day to try to live by it. And I knew that it was all bound up with Alison; with choosing Alison, and having to go on choosing her every day. When Lily de Seitas had whispered it in my ear I had taken it as a retrospective thing, a comment on my past; and on my anecdote. But it had been a signpost to my future. Adulthood was like a mountain, and I stood at the foot of this cliff of ice, this impossible and unclimbable: Thou shalt not commit pain.

  "Could I have a fag, Nick?"

  I went and got her a cigarette. She lay puffing it; intermittently red-apple-checked, 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 Nescafé 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 seffish need to have one's laundry looked after, buttons sewn on, ruts served, name propagated, meals decently cooked.

  I made another cup of coffee. 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. As if I had kicked an emotionally 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 contra-suggestible. 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. Hazard, 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 gray 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.

  "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 why, then when you're sure she's head over fucking heels in love with you, you act like a real gentlemen. 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 —"

  "Dah!" 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 on 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 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 antihero'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 center. 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 is silence; is 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 colors 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 naticnal 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.

  Then.

  In the outer seat opposite, diagonally from me.

  So quietly, so simply.

  She was looking down, then up, straight at me. I jerked round, searching for Kemp. But I knew where Kemp was; she was walking home.

  All the time I had expected some spectacular reentry, some mysterious call, a metaphorical, perhaps even literal, descent into a modem Tartarus. Not this. And yet, as I stared at her, unable to speak, at her steady bright look, the smallest smile, I understood that this was the only po
ssible 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; and so she came, yet in some way heightened, stranger, still with the aura of another world. From, yet not of, the crowd behind her.

  A dark brown tweed suit. A dark green scarf tied peasant-fashion round her head. She sat with her hands in her lap, waiting for me to speak, those clear eyes on mine. And it was impossible. Now it was here, I couldn't change. I couldn't look at her.

  I looked down at the book, as if I wanted no more to do with her. Then angrily up past her at a moronically curious family, scene-sniffing faces at the table across the gangway. Then down at my book again.

  Suddenly she stood up 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 out through the door.

  I let a few stunned, torn moments pass. Then I went after her, pushing roughly past the people in my way.

  She was walking slowly across the grass, towards the east. I came beside her. She gave the bottom of my legs the smallest glance. We said nothing. I looked round. So many people, so many too far to distinguish.

  And Regent's Park. Regent's Park. That other meeting; 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 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. Returned from the dead. Yet it infuriated me that she would not look at me, had made not the slightest sign of apology; and now 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 longer, and she had a warm tan. She looked as she had when we had first met. 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 man's-collared shirt beneath the suit. 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 shoe.