The Magus, A Revised Version (116 page)

She said it, and the accompanying look was without a smile. Her eyes held mine a long moment, then she turned into the taxi. I gazed after it until it disappeared out of sight past Brompton Oratory; without tears, but just, I imagined, as that poor devil of a butcher must have stared down at the Aubusson carpet.

And so I waited.

It seemed sadistic, this last wasteland of days. It was as if Conchis, with Alison
’
s connivance, proceeded by some outmoded Victorian dietetic morality—one couldn
’
t have more jam, the sweetness of events, until one ate a lot more bread, the dry stodge of time. But I was long past philosophizing. The next weeks consisted of a long struggle between my growing—not diminishing—impatience and the manner of life I took up to dull it. Almost every night I contrived
to pass through Russell Square, rather in the way, I suppose, that the sailors
’
wives and black-eyed Susans would, more out of boredom than hope, haunt the quays in sailing days. But my ship never showed a light. Two or three times I went out to Much Hadham, at night, but the darkness of Dinsford House was as complete as the darkness in Russell Square.

For the rest, I spent hours in cinemas, hours reading books, mainly rubbish, because all I required of a book during that period was that it kept my mind drugged. I used to drive all through the night to places I did not want to go to—to Oxford, to Brighton, to Bath. These long drives calmed me, as though I was doing something constructive by racing hard through the night; scorching through sleeping towns, always turning back in the small hours and driving exhausted into London in the dawn; then sleeping till four or five in the afternoon.

It was not only my boredom that needed calming; well before my meetings with Lily de Seitas I had had another problem.

I spent many of my waking hours in Soho or Chelsea; and they are
not the areas where the chaste
fiancé
goes—unless he is burning to test
his chastity. There were dragons enough in the forest, from the farded old bags in the doorways of Greek Street to the equally pickup-able but more appetizing
‘
models
’
and demi-debs of the King
’
s Road. Every so often I would see a girl who would excite me sexually. I began by repressing the very idea; then frankly admitted it. If I resolutely backed out of, or looked away from, promising situations, it was for a variety of reasons; and reasons generally more selfish than noble. I wanted to show
them—
if they had eyes present to be shown, and I could never be sure that they hadn
’
t—that I could live without affaires; and less consciously I wanted to show myself the same thing. I also wanted to be able to face Alison with the knowledge as a weapon, an added lash to the cat—if the cat had to be used.

The truth was that the recurrent new feeling I had for Alison had nothing to do with sex. Perhaps it had something to do with my alienation from England and the English, my specieslessness, my sense of exile; but it seemed to me
that I could have slept with a
different girl every night, and still have gone on wanting to see Alison just as much. I wanted something else from her now—and what it was only she could give me. That was the distinction. Anyone could give me sex. But only she could give me … I couldn
’
t call it love, because I saw it as something experimental, depending, even before the experiment proper began, on factors like the degree of her contrition, the fullness of her confession, the extent to which she could convince me that
she
still loved me; that her love had caused her betrayal. And then I felt towards the godgame some of the mixed fascination and repulsion one feels for an intelligent religion; I knew there
‘
must be something
’
in it, but I as surely knew that I was not the religious type. Besides, the logical conclusion of this more clearly seen distinction between love and sex was certainly not an invitation to enter a world of fidelity. In one sense Mrs de Seitas had been preaching to the converted in all that she had said about a clean surgical abscission of what went on in the loins from what went on in the heart.

Yet something very deep in me revolted. I could swallow her story, but it lay queasily on my stomach. It flouted something deeper than convention and received ideas. It flouted an innate sense that I ought to find all I needed in Alison and that if I failed to do so, then something more than morality or sensuality was involved; something I couldn
’
t define, but which was both biological and metaphysical; to do with imagination and with death. Perhaps Lily de Seitas looked forward to a sexual morality for the twenty-first century; but something was missing, some vital safeguard; and I suspected I saw to the twenty-second.

Easy to think such things; but harder to live them, in the meanwhile-still-twentieth century. Our instincts emerge so much more nakedly, our emotions and wills veer so much more quickly, than ever before. A young Victorian of my age would have thought nothing of waiting fifty months, let along fifty days, for his beloved; and of never permitting a single unchaste thought to sully his mind, let alone an act his body. I could get up in a young-Victorian mood; but by midday, with a pretty girl standing beside me in a bookshop, I might easily find myself praying to the God I did not believe in that she wouldn
’
t turn and smile at me.

Then one evening in Bayswater a girl did smile; she didn
’
t have to
turn. It was in an espresso bar, and I had spent most of my meal watching her talking opposite with a friend; her bare arms, her promising breasts. She looked Italian; black-haired, doe-eyed. Her friend went
off
, and the girl sat back and gave me a very direct, though perfectly nice, smile with her eyes. She wasn
’
t a tart; she was just saying, if you want to start talking, come on.

I got clumsily to my feet, and spent an embarrassing minute waiting at the entrance for the waitress to come and take my money. My shameful retreat was partly inspired by paranoia. The girl and her friend had come in after me, and had sat at a table where I couldn
’
t help watching them. It was absurd. I began to feel that every girl who crossed my path was hired to torment and test me; I started checking through the window before I went in to c
off
ee-bars and restaurants, to see if I could get a corner free of sight and sound of the dreadful creatures. My behaviour became increasingly clownish; and I grew angrier and angrier with the circumstances that made it so. Then Jojo came.

It was during the last week of September, a fortnight after my last meeting with Lily de Seitas. Bored to death with myself, I went late one afternoon to see an old Ren
é
Clair. I sat without thinking next to a humped-up shape and watched the film—the immortal
Italian Straw Hat.
By various hoarse snuffling noises I deduced that the Beckett-like thing next to me was female. After half an hour she turned to me for a light. I saw a round-cheeked face, no make-up, a fringe of brown hair pigtailed at the back, thick eyebrows, very dirty fingernails holding a fag-end. When the lights went on and we waited for the next feature she tried, with a really pitiable amateurishness, to pick me up. She was dressed in jeans, a grubby grey polo-necked sweater, a very ancient man
’
s duffel coat; but she had three queer asexual charms—a face-splitting grin, a hoarse Scots accent, and an air of such solitary sloppiness that I saw in her at once both a kindred spirit and someone worthy of a modern Mayhew. Somehow the grin didn
’
t seem quite real, but the result of pulling strings. She sat puppy-slumped like a dejected fat boy, and tried very unsuccessfully to dig out of me what I did, where I lived; and then, perhaps because of the froglike grin, perhaps because it was a lapse so patently unlikely to lead to danger, so patently not a test, I asked her if she wanted a c
off
ee.

So we went to a c
off
ee-bar. I was hungry,
I
said I was going to have
some spaghetti. At first she wouldn
’
t have any; then she admitted she had spent the last of her money on getting into the cinema; then she ate like a wolf. I grew full of kindness to dumb animals.

“
We went on to a pub. She had come from Glasgow, it seemed, two months before, to be an art student. In Glasgow she had belonged to some bizarre Celtic-Bohemian fringe; and now she lived in c
off
ee-bars and cinemas,
‘
with a wee bitta help from ma friends
’
. She had packed art in; the eternal provincial tramp.

I felt increasingly sure of my chastity with her; and perhaps that
was why I liked her so much so fast. She amused me, she had character,
with her husky voice and her grotesque lack of normal femininity. She also had a total absence of pity about herself; and therefore all the attraction of an opposite. I drove her to her door, a rooming-house in Notting Hill, and she evidently thought I would be expecting to
‘
kip
’
with her. I quickly disillusioned her.

‘
Then we
’
ll no see each other again.
’

‘
We could.
’
I looked at her dumpy figure beside me.
‘
How old are you?
’

‘
Twenty-one.
’

‘
Rubbish.
’

‘
Twenty.
’

‘
Eighteen?
’

‘
Ge
’
away wi
’
you. I
’
m all of twenty.
’

‘
I
’
ve got a proposition to make.
’
She sniffed.
‘
Sorry. A proposal. Actually, I
’
m waiting around for someone .
.. a girl … to come back from
Australia. And what I
’
d very much like for two or three weeks is a companion.
’
Her grin split her face from ear to ear.
‘
I
’
m
off
ering you a job. There are agencies in London that do this sort of thing. Provide escorts and partners.
’

She still grinned.
‘
I
’
d awfla like you just to come up.
’

‘
No—
I
meant exactly what I
off
ered. You
’
re temporarily drifting. So am I. So let
’
s drift together … and I
’
ll take care of the finances. No sex. Just companionship.
’

She rubbed the insides of her wrists together; grinned again and shrugged, as if one madness more was immaterial.

So I took up with her. If they had their eyes on me, it would be up to them to make a move. I thought it might even help to precipitate matters.

Jojo was a strange creature, as douce as rain—London rain, because she was seldom very clean-and utterly without ambition or
meanness. She slipped perfectly into the role I cast her for. We slopped
round the cinemas, slopped round the pubs, slopped round exhibitions. Sometimes we slopped round all day up in my flat. But always, at some point in the night, I sent her slopping back to her cubbyhole. Often we sat for hours at the same table reading magazines and newspapers and never exchanging a word. After seven days I felt I had known her for seven years. I gave her four pounds a week and
off
ered to buy her some clothes and pay her tiny rent. She accepted a dark-blue jersey from Marks and Spencers, but nothing else. She fulfilled her function very well; she put
off
every other girl who looked at us and on my side I cultivated a sort of lunatic transferred fidelity towards her.

She was always equable, grateful for the smallest bone, like an old mongrel; patient, un
off
ended, casual. I refused to talk about Alison, and probably Jojo ceased to believe in her; accepted, in her accept-all way, that I was just
‘
a wee bit cracked
’
.

Then one October evening I knew I wouldn
’
t sleep and I
off
ered to drive her anywhere she wanted within a night
’
s range. She thought for a moment and said, goodness knows why, Stonehenge. So we drove down to Stonehenge and walked around the looming menhirs at three o
’
clock with a cold wind blowing and the sound of peewits in the moon-drenched wrack above our heads. Later we sat in the car and ate chocolate. I could just see her face; the dark smudges of her eyes and the innocent puppy-grin.