The Magus, A Revised Version (118 page)

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 c
off
ee, 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.

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 Octo
ber, 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 c
off
ee.

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 th
e 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.