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 this other situation.
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 experiment proper 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; and 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 theory, 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 evolution 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 alone 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. 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 coffee bars and restaurants, to see if I could get a corner free of sight and sound of the dreadful creatures. My behavior 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 René 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 makeup, 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 gray polo-necked sweater, a very ancient man’s duffle-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 coffee.
So we went to a coffee 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 coffee 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 visual 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 offering 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 juist to come up.”
“No—I meant exactly what I offered. 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 inside 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 offered 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.