The Magus, A Revised Version

by John Fowles

  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 wait
ing, 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.’