John Fowles - The Magus

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.”

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 ffing 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.